Post
by leedsquietman » Mon Dec 07, 2009 3:42 pm
Even though I love Steinberg's software, and their new firewire interface the MR816 (CSX) which is designed by parent company Yamaha is the absolute dog's nuts (awesome quality, great DSP fx on the CSX version too), I wouldn't ever buy their hardware (which is all 3rd party manufactured anyway) because their record of supporting the gear is terrible. Even though Yamaha is now making most of Steinberg's hardware which inspires a little more confidence, Yamaha themselves don't have the greatest history of supporting products either and discontinuing products quickly.
Pity, because some of Steinberg's hardware is really awesome. The MIDEX was one of the best MIDI interfaces of all times, stable as hell with it's LTB protocol and expensive (800 bucks on first release) and the company announced long ago that they were dropping support for it - so no Vista support, no 64 bit drivers will ever be written - Steinberg's team wrote the drivers, the 3rd party only supplied the hardware, but they steadfastly refuse to support the product. Houston is the festering boil on the backside of the company, they dropped that product and ignored support requests almost as soon as it hit the stores. Issues like these have caused a lot of resentment and a sizeable number of people to move on to other DAWS.
Fortunately, I have never been burned by this as I have only ever owned SB software. Discontinuing products like Hypersonic, XPhraze etc wasn't in their hands, because Wizoo who designed it all were bought out by Digidesign, who then ordered a cease and desist order on continued support.
Having said this, Cubase 5 and Wavelab are still killer products IMHO.