Quote:
Originally Posted by MetalBucketbot
Getting either an Akai EIE Pro
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Don't.
I can't comment on the pros/cons of mixers vs interfaces, but absolutely do not get Akai EIE pro (or its clone, the M-Audio M-track quad). It's just absolutely useless. Extremely poorly designed, full of design flaws - I managed to utterly destroy two preamps because their phantom-power circuitry wasn't wired properly and I'd plugged a guitar lead into one input and three condenser mics into the other three and turned phantom power on - for some reason they'd wired the jack connectors in the combo to the phantom power as well - which ended up totally destroying half of the preamps. They are now unusably noisy.
Aside from that the drivers are awful. The only way to get it to play back without unspeakably awful clicking popping and grinding sounds (and I mean seriously unrecognisably glitchy) is to operate it at 96khz - which would be fine except my projects tend to be very large and involve a lot of sampling - which means my templates just don't work at such a high sample rate, and everything starts chugging pretty quickly.
Right now my Akai EIE pro is sitting on my desk wired into the output of a far superior interface - so it's basically just a really expensive VU meter. That's literally all I use it for.
I know this isn't really the point of your thread but if you end up deciding to buy an interface please do not buy Akai or M-Audio, for your own sake.