What was the worst gear that you ever owned?

[rasputin]

When Reason first came out, everyone realized someone needed to release a small midi keyboard with knobs and sliders. Well, someone did (I ordered it all the was from Australia since there were no dealers in the US). Besides being made so cheaply and shoddily you couldn't believe it, and that it lost all settings when you turned it off, and it took 6 D-cell batteries to run without the power supply, they forgot to tell people that the knobs only had 5 bit resolution! Thus instead of sending out MIDI values 0, 1, 2, ...127 it would send out 0, 4, 8, 12, ... etc. As cheap as the Oxygen 8 was it still was infinitely better than that horrible thing.

The other horrible thing (and this was back in the 70s) was a small Allen and Heath mixer that was made with totally crappy components and build quality. The potentiometers and audio i/o jacks were all attached to the main circuit board with solder, and the metal housing just wrapped around it. So unless you treated the thing with kid gloves the connectors and controls would develop noise. Dust and dirt could easily get inside too due to its construction. And I paid something like USD600 for it since there was nothing like it at the time (I wanted to use it for multitracking with my Teac 4 channel tape recorder.) But each time I wanted to switch from recording to mix down, I had to remove all the cables and repatch them... ugh. When the first Tascam PortaStudio came out I was astounded...why did it take some company so long to figure out how to do that???

But even with the headaches you get with computers, I still would have a hard time going back..

r.

[pauncy]

Yamaha SU700
Akai S2000

[b0unce]

maudio 410

[snowtires]

korg es-1

You are joking right? That's top of my list of gear I wish I'd never sold. Maybe the sound wasn't all that, but the interface was. I'm getting one again one day, I think.

BTW, if any of you have any MIDI gear, effects boxes, synths, even Peavey samplers, long as it's not too heavy, really, and you can be fucked to ship it to Denmark, please PM me. I'm quite likely to be interested.

i HATE my es-1. the jacks are crap and there is so much channel bleed it's disgusting. my band used it live until we realized that, even with the click panned hard right and the other drums panned hard left and only the drums going through the house system, you could still hear the click in the pa, plain as day. talk about a piece of crap.

as far as worst gear goes - protools m powered, nord electro (who the hell wants a $1500 mono-timbral keyboard? when you switch between sounds, the previous sound stops completely, it's totally lame), soundblaster extigy (they might as well have called it the soundblaster latency), kaoss pad 2 (WAY too noisy), dod votec pedal (rarely worked properly, no battery option, broke within two weeks).

[noisetonepause]

i HATE my es-1. the jacks are crap and there is so much channel bleed it's disgusting. my band used it live until we realized that, even with the click panned hard right and the other drums panned hard left and only the drums going through the house system, you could still hear the click in the pa, plain as day. talk about a piece of crap.

Maybe the sound wasn't all that, but the interface was.

True about the crosstalk (S/N ratio wasn't good, either), but that's not why I loved it. It was immediate. Mmm.

[majais]

I am amazed! I worked with the FW 410 never any pops or crackle!(just too much use of CPU) Live 5 crashed maybe 3 times, but that had to do with NI software. Reaktor 4&5 NEVER crashed!
If you buy Reason and wonder about no audio in you just don't buy it!
That's why i like to test software thoroughly before i buy.
I bought the Saffire (o.k. shit about the plugins, but for the rest better than the FW410)
The worst gear i ever bought was a Edirol UA-3 a USB analog digital converter the first OSX versions would just ignore it (sentient software:) )!
Maybe I'm from another planet?

[b0unce]

the 410's are bound to work on a few machines