Re: Audio Interface for Notebook Users

[Brian Good <bsgood@adelphia.net>]

mech wrote:
> At 9:25 PM -0500 3/23/06, Brian Good wrote:
> 
>>
>> I was just helping a friend with a similar purchase, and we stumbled 
>> across a couple new interfaces from Alesis.  Apparently only the 
>> smaller of the two is shipping right now.  I know absolutely nothing 
>> about their sound, reliability, or anything else, but they do look 
>> like they offer a fair bit of functionality for the price.  The 
>> smaller one looks like it only has two line-out channels, which makes 
>> it not so looper-friendly, but the larger one has 8.
> 
> 
> It may be a non-issue (since these are Firewire, and a different basic 
> architecture) but I've got a two-channel audio interface built into my 
> Alesis Photon X25 USB MIDI controller.  I've stopped even attempting to 
> use it.  It has a tendency to randomly blast huge noise bursts after 
> some unspecified period.  This is especially fun with headphones on 
> (like I need any extra help going deaf).  It won't stop until you reboot 
> the computer.
> 
> I didn't really care all that much (once my ears stopped ringing). 
> Frankly, I bought the darn thing primarily for its Axyz controller. 
> Anything additional is pretty much cake, so I just wrote off that 
> functionality.
> 
> As I said, it might not apply to this series.  However, I'm somewhat 
> leery of the Alesis audio interfaces now, at least in terms of quality 
> control.
> 
>     --m.

Heh.  That's why you probably don't want to buy version 1.0 of anything, 
or version 5.0 from some companies.  Personally I've had bad luck with 
an early M-Audio Firewire 410, for example.  It seems to know when it's 
being used in a live performance, because I've had it fail two out of 
the three times I've used it that way.  To be fair, it was running under 
Windows, where it was more problematic than in my Mac setup, so maybe it 
was a Microsoft problem, rather than an M-Audio one.  But there's 
nothing quite as much fun as downloading a replacement driver via Wifi 
during a dress rehearsal from a stage in the middle of the Arizona high 
desert.

Brian