what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

[Forge.]

I admit the A-3000 was quite shitty in the sampling department but I used it with great success as an analog synth and a multi-fx. I still cant replicate the warm analog sound I was getting out of this box with any vst synth. Auto-wah+fuzz and you'd get some killer NIN guitar sound.

Paid 2600$ for it at the time. Pfffff...

I used to love my A3000 - until you could do it all so much more easily on the computer and I'd boot it up and wonder how the hell I ever did so much with such a tiny LCD - but I had great times with that.... I spent about the same - $3000 Australian - had to get a loan! lol

m-audio fw410

I know a lot of people hate this interface, but mine has been great.

YES, the drivers were shit. They finally seem to have got that fixed. 4 years after it was released though.

YES it acts odd at times -- but never if you actually shut down your computer, then put the FW410 in, then start up your computer. It does stink that you can't hot plug the thing and have it work reliably, but they certainly never said that you could. It was important enough, or at least a known problem, because mine came with a separate sheet of yellow paper in the box warning me not to hot plug it, ever.

Mine has been a workhorse and never caused me a problem playing live, but I suspect I'm the rare exception here.

mine is still going strong after about 10 years. It has some quirks, but it's kept on going. The hotplugging issue was fixed with the FW800 connector, so I can hotplug now on my macbook - so long as you hotplug the 800 connector

[Muzik 4 Machines]

a crappy m-audio copy of a roger linn guitar sequenced fx, what a piece of shit it was
not working as a soundcard
crappy sounding amp sim

[golemus]

I have a lot to say about this topic

Although the worst ones are not music hardware. Lets begin with music hardware:

- BSE (or BNE or something beginning with B) DJ double CD-player (Denon clone). Can you believe that pressing rewind or fast forward the unit was actually thinking for over 10 seconds before starting to rewind or fast forward , no wonder my DJ skills development was very slow in the beginning.

Non music hardware:

- the worst piece of hardware I have ever bought in my life was Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1630 laptop. They had to change its motherboard 6 times inside 6 months! Most of the time I didn't have the laptop but it was in maintenance. After that I reclaimed and got a new Amilo.

- the second worst is Nokia E70 cell phone, absolutely nightmare with so many problems and bugs that you wouldn't believe it. After that I had Nokia E75, the amount of problems halved but was still unacceptably high.

- IBM 40GB Deskstar (aka "Deathstar") hard disk. I bought two of them and in 6 months they went broken 3 times.

[taffmonster]

my akai LPK25. I thought it would be useful having a keyboard you can carry around with you, but no. The keys don't work properly if you play a melody where the keys run in sequence some notes won't play. if you move from a black key to the white key next to it, for some reason the white key won't sound. Its bloody stupid. poor build quality.

[memoryshell]

Virus ti2 .. Highly overrated software in a box.

[Komodovaran]

my akai LPK25. I thought it would be useful having a keyboard you can carry around with you, but no. The keys don't work properly if you play a melody where the keys run in sequence some notes won't play. if you move from a black key to the white key next to it, for some reason the white key won't sound. Its bloody stupid. poor build quality.

This.



And then I purchased a Novation SL MKII, only to make it collect dust.

I hate myself I should use my keyboard more often, but I have nowhere to put it.

Ah well. The good thing about hardware is that it doesn't wither.

[dr_loop]

... my first computer!
It had 256 bytes of memory, a kind of numeric keypad and two seven-segments digits as display.
The only thing you could do with it was look at it!

[synnack]

This thread is like memory lane. I also spent WAY too much on an Akai sampler back in the day only to get irritated by trying to work in a tiny little screen then realize um, computers can do this.

For worst hardware it's a tie between a Behringer mixer I had that would randomly work or not while on tour, and the M-Audio Axiom.

The Axiom was well made and all, but the endless knobs are a total joke. I do lots of fast 0-full knob twists and there's just no way to do that with those knobs, turn turn turn turn turn. blah. I even opened a ticket with M-Audio to be told "yeah this controller is really not for you".

[nopattern]

my akai LPK25. I thought it would be useful having a keyboard you can carry around with you, but no. The keys don't work properly if you play a melody where the keys run in sequence some notes won't play. if you move from a black key to the white key next to it, for some reason the white key won't sound. Its bloody stupid. poor build quality.

interesting, i've been carrying mine around in a backpack for years and it works flawlessly. i think i even threw it at a wall once when i fucked up part of an otherwise beautiful take. seriously i've abused it for years and still looks great and works perfectly. i also like it because im not a keyboard player but the size of the keys allow me to do chord progressions on one hand that i can't do on a full size controller.

adding to the thread, my worst hardware purchase was basically everything i ever bought before i knew what i was doing. it's easy to buy gear and think it sucks if you don't know how to use it

[keefbaker]

Toss up between the crappy behringer multiband compressor whose input is so low you need a preamp before you can use it and the Presonus Firewire Studio project which makes me sad beacuse if it didn't fart like a bastard all the time and would allow me to get to a decent latency without glitching its ass off it would probably be my best.

[Forge.]

This thread is like memory lane. .

have you clicked on the first couple of pages? 7 years ago, interesting to see some of the comments back then!

[Cool Character]

If you see one of these in the wild:



Kill it. Kill it before it takes another life.

[Forge.]

If you see one of these in the wild:



Kill it. Kill it before it takes another life.

a mate was using one of those when I first met him... that's all he was making beats with and it was immediately apparent from listening to what he did on it that he was an immensely creative person and talented music producer

but it sounded like shit and I introduced him to sound forge, acid, Reason 1 and Logic or cubase

dude is now way more successful than me.

[oslonovski]

my akai LPK25. I thought it would be useful having a keyboard you can carry around with you, but no. The keys don't work properly if you play a melody where the keys run in sequence some notes won't play. if you move from a black key to the white key next to it, for some reason the white key won't sound. Its bloody stupid. poor build quality.

Never had a problem with mine. Key action and build quality is pretty decent for the price.

[Piplodocus]

My Edirol controller keyboard. Can't remember the model. Bought it. Barely used it for over a year. Just after warranty some keys stopped working. Googled it and found it seemed a regular problem. Ended up taking it all to pieces, and using an eraser on the contact bits, put it back together and it worked ok for a short while but then they stopped again along with more.

Edirol then re-released it with a slight hardware upgrade in a darker grey colour (mine was silver) because they obviously knew it was shit. Was barely used, never gigged and total POS. It's still in my loft somewhere. I may cut it up, mod it, and make something out of it one day using the board/knobs but soldering switches of some kind onto the key bits.

Bought an Axiom 61 instead. That works fine a lot longer later...