The ZED-R16 combines an analog recording mixer with a FireWire soundcard, MIDI controls and 'home-studio' routing for building tracks in the studio, recording live gigs, mix-downs and remixing. Featuring 16 mono inputs, 2 stereo inputs, a high quality dual mic pre-amp, 4-band fully-parametric EQ, 4 auxes, a stereo bus, 2 stereo returns, 18+18 FireWire I/O and 8+8 ADAT I/O, it can work as a standard analog mixer while recording multi-track via FireWire or ADAT, as a traditional inline mixer recording with send and return per channel via FireWire, or as a MIDI controller via switchable channel faders.

It also boasts control room speaker outputs, two separate artist monitor feeds, two analog recording outputs in addition to the digital interface, and a dedicated internal condenser talkback mic. Each channel has its own independent soundcard channel, so instruments can be recorded simultaneously (pre or post EQ) into the sequencer separately. To minimize clock jitter and provide synchronicity with other devices, it is equipped with the professional JetPLL digital audio chipset.