When I first bought my Allen and Heath ZED 10FX I bought the comparable Yamaha, Mackie, Soundcraft, and Behringer Mixers, and brought them all home set them up with two sets of powered speakers (Mackie and JBL), and listened to them all. I kept the ZED, returned all the others, and soon after, I bought another ZED as a backup! For me, the ZED lined up nicely soundwise with my microphone of choice (Shure Beta 87), and I liked the feature set, which worked for what I wanted to do with it. The things I really like about the ZED besides the wonderful sounding preamps are: the tap tempo delay, the decent sounding reverbs, the sweepable mids, the high Z FET inputs for guitars with the extra 26db boost if needed, and 30db output pad for submixing into other mixers!
I have actually considered having a ZED 10FX custom mounted into a custom powered speaker cabinet for an all in one rig! Like a Schertler Jam 400 on steroids
I have since bought a QSC Touchmix 8, and it really sounds good too!