Anyone used the Akai EIE Pro sound card yet?

[ark]

Not many (any?) with the ability to plug in four guitars, that's the main thing that's got me hooked.

Roland Octa-Capture
MOTU 4PRE
Or you could get something with two mic/instrument inputs and two line inputs and then add an outboard preamp.

[Punky921]

I was looking at this before I went with the Focusrite Scarlett 18i6. I liked how expandable the 18i6 was, and that kind of sealed the deal for me.

[crumhorn]

Well It's not looking good so far - totally unusable with my Vaio Laptop.

But is it a problem with the PC or the EIE Pro? That is the question.

I've Not had this PC long and haven't had an external card working properly with it yet. It didn't much like my old Firepod interface, so who knows?

So far I have:

Constant crackling when plugged into a USB 3.0 socket.

On USB 2 - Playback sound starts to crack up after about 10 to 20 minutes and gets steadily worse.

Latency seems to increase over time !!! ???

recording inputs are interrupted by blasts of noise and distortion. After a bit of this it will settle down again but now the source plugged into input 1 will come through on channel 2 !!

USB Hub function gets screwed as well and controller messages start taking several seconds to reach the software.

Apart from that it's excellent.

Some kind of USB frame misalignment problem going on here I think.

I had a good moan about it in their forum, where it seems somebody else has similar problems -> http://community.akaipro.com/akai_profe ... ise_static

I'm phoning Akai support on Monday, but if they can't help then it's going back to the shop.

[crumhorn]

OK..... Soooo.....

After a lot of messing around

Disabled ACPI Battery control
Disabled all networking
enable all inputs and outputs in ableton preferences
set buffer to 49 samples (that's what it offers at 44.1 KHz 256, 192, 128 and 49 !?)
shut down
connect and power up all usb devices before turning on the PC

sweet as a nut.

been running for several hours,

latency playing on my digital piano via MIDI in on BCR2000 connected to USB hub on EIC PRO triggering Ableton's EIC Grand Piano sample is unnoticeable. Can't really tell if I'm hearing the sound from ableton before or after the built in sound of the piano.

It's like chalk and cheese compared to yesterdays experience.

In the process I've even managed to get my old firepod working properly again so now that I've got the EIC working nicely there's a chance I don't actually need it after all - I only bought it because my Firepod wouldn't work reliably on the new PC.

I'll post again when I've had a chance to use it in anger.

[agent314]

How do the preamps sound?

[crumhorn]

^^^ First impressions are good, but I haven't really tested it properly yet - needed a break from it to be honest.

Got a session planned for tomorrow night so should know better after that how well it stands up to real world use.

Also need to methodically work through the various things I did to get it working - still not sure what the key thing was that made it work.

One thing I discovered is that it can work OK on the USB 3.0 ports, but only with the ASIO driver and only at the 49 sample buffer size. enabling Windows audio or using a larger buffer results in constant crackling - weird.

[dancing Ray]

Finally I managed to get my hands on it, sorry for the delay.

Impressions here are quite good.
Tested on macbook pro OSX 10.6.8

The overall build quality is good, solid metal case, good knobs. Downside: the switches are a little bit stiff (imo).

Driver installation was flawless -> plug & play

Lowest possible latency is about 10 ms with a buffer size of 64 samples, all IO enabled. 64 samples is the lowest possible option.
It played my live drumming set without any hickups or something.
The USB hub worked good, also.

Soundwise I think the EIE pro is ok. It had to compete with my Motu 828 mk2, though, which is not fair.

The Motu has a good deal more punch than the EIE, at least with the main outs, the quality of the headphone out equals.
One thing I find a bit strange is the behavior of the monitor volume knob, I have not quite gotten to understand it. But that´s probably just me.

The preamps introduce a fair amount of noise, compared to the Motu pramps. And they sound a bit flabby, in my ears. Always keep in mind that 828 series from Motu costs nearly three times as much as the EIE pro. And a very big plus for the EIE is: it has got for of them preamps!
The EIE is not made for high quality acoustic recordings, but it is good to record some dirty loops for sure.

The fancy meters are just that, fancy meters. In fact they are quite in annoying (admittedly first I liked them). They flash red when you go near 0 db. They even flashed when I set Lives limiter do -0,8 db. When you play a banging loud set you will have a flash feast :-/

SO:
All in all I think it really is a good piece of gear. Lots of functionality, that is 4 preamps, 4 outputs, 4 inserts, USB hub (which I think is a great Idea) and not to forget the Midi IO for a very fair price.

Hope it helps
Ray

[crumhorn]

My experience on PC has been rather different I'm afraid.

Thought I had it working OK but after jamming into it for about 20 minutes and messing around with various effects in Live the input crashed again and started producing horrible distorted sound and white noise and crossing over to the wrong channel so We gave up and went back to Firepod which now works flawlessly provided the wireless network is disabled.

The output side kept working OK though. Compared to the firepod I'd say it has a slightly deeper bass extension and slightly less cluttered mid range. But the differences are tiny.

For the short while that the inputs were working I only had a chance to test it with guitar. You have to leave a lot of headroom to stop it flashing red all the time, but this is OK recording at 24bit. For me the experience of playing through it felt less solid than the guitar preamp on the firepod, but that is very subjective and likely coloured by my overall lack of confidence in the thing,

But before I send it back I'll contact the tech support to see if they can resolve the issue with the inputs crashing,

[rkramer4]

Totally forgot I was considering buying this as my first audio interface... back when they announced it in, what, August 2011? Seriously... why hype it if the damn thing isn't even out in February of 2012?

Glad I went with my Focusrite Scarlett, the software was hard to grasp at first but the thing's been super dependable since I got past that hump.

[shootinblanks95]

We have some on order down at music villa and i was thinking of getting one myself, good price and it looks to have alot of use to be had. Akiai does good with ableton and I would guess they didn't hit far from perfect with this product, when they come in ill pick one up to test. over all though im worrie about latenci so if its good their ill wright a rave review. i like that it has the 3 usb bus powered ports that frees the spot for the eie and gives me an xstraw 2 hubs. phantom power is a must, and the line ins and outs are plenty for recording single or multipul instraments, and the 2 bd meters are nice. Since you get all this in one for a very low price id say its worth looking into. But every set up has a differents way of doing the same things, do what works for your needs not what everyones ranting about.

[crumhorn]

I tried it on my old 32 bit Vista laptop (dual core vaio) and it works perfectly from a software point of view. managed to capture a very nice quality recording from the bug mics on my Spanish guitar.

However now I've had it working reliably I noticed there is a fault on one of the preamps which has a low level spluttering type of noise which is not there on the other three inputs. So it has to go back anyway,

[giacecco]

Hi All,
Did you try if the EIE (Pro or not) can be used without being connected to a PC or Mac? I am curious to know if I can use it as a quick pre-amp for guitar practice, between the guitar and monitor speakers. Thanks!

G.

[crumhorn]

Works fine stand alone. The mono switch is useful as well - otherwise inputs 1 & 3 go to the left channel and 2 & 4 go to the right.

[Mikey909]

Im also wondering which one of these interfaces are better.I've heard that the akai eie has a noise problem which is very disappointing because this product has very good features.So im planning to go with Saffire 6 .Any Suggestions???

[bambamfox]

firmware update 1.04 is out -> maybe you should give it a try
http://community.akaipro.com/akai_profe ... s_released

i like mine eie pro