Old MacDonald had a DAW

...EIE-IO!

*cough*

OK, now that I have that out of my system, I'll tell you a bit about my first impressions of the Akai EIE audio interface. This is the basic model, not the Pro (and as such, is limited to recording at 44.1. For the demos and scratch tracks I record, this is not heartbreaking). It's a 4-in, 4-out interface, phantom power, VU meters, MIDI in and out, 4 audio inserts (for external effects units), and a built-in 3 port USB hub. Usual street price seems to be around $200, but I found it on sale at Guitar Center for $145. It's a well-spec'ed interface at this price point, so it seemed to be worth taking the jump. One impatient week later, it arrived on my doorstep.

On getting it out of the box, all I can say is that it's dressed to impress. The EIE has all metal construction, in a pleasing color scheme. And what can I say, I'm a sucker for VU meters. Also, it's heavy....you'll have to work a bit to yank it off the desk with a guitar cord, and rubber feet underneath give it some grip on your desk. The knobs are positive feeling, and the switches are pure retro (going along with the overall look). I'll admit it: I'm a designer, and the overall look (and cheesy joke in the name) is what got me to look at this interface in the first place. It looks great, like a piece of vintage equipment crossed with a science experiment...

There's a bit of negative to go along with the overall design. While the silver text on red background looks nice in good lighting, it's nigh-impossible to read in dim lighting. This will become less of a problem as I learn the controls, but it makes for a lot of squinting in low light conditions initially. The EIE Pro is black text on silver, which seems to imply that legible low-light text is a professional feature.

Setup was a straightforward affair. It's class-compliant in OSX, so no drivers ware needed (or even provided, although it comes with a disc with Cubase LE and ASIO drivers for Windows). The VU meters are lit with LEDs with a pleasing bright light (and flash red when clipping). It immediately showed up in Audio MIDi setup, so I set up the cabling to go from the EIE to my Roland XV-5080. Plugged in audio cables and did a test, and we're in business. OK, time to get the XV patch editor talking to the new interface...

...and thus began a period of about 40 minutes of serious hair-pulling. For some reason, the XV editor wasn't showing the ports of the EIE in the MIDI setup dialog. Many, many tests, retests, adding and removing of hardware later, and the answer was found: the EIE doesn't have a name for its MIDI ports...it's blank (and doesn't seem to have a way to name them). The XV editor was showing blank lines in my port choice list. Those weren't spaces, those were the ports from the EIE.

Once I selected those blank spaces, I was able to synchronize, and was off to the races.

The controls take a little getting used to. The master level control on the front only controls outputs 1 and 2 (3 and 4 are always at full volume). Not a problem once you get past cabling, though. What can be a bit confusing is the monitor knob. Turn it full counterclockwise, and it's a zero-latency monitor of the inout to the interface. Full clockwise, and it's sound coming from the computer. This will take some playing with, as it's possible to make certain tracks disappear from the mix, only to notice the knob is wrong (external MIDI tracks took a bit of figuring out). Keeping the monitor knob at 12 o'clock seems to be the best method, for now.

I loaded up an old project to try out sound quality. Previously, I had been using a 512 sample buffer with built-in sound, and was able to reduce that to 256 with no clicks and pops (2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, a little long in the tooth.) A faster system should have no problem with lower latencies.

Beyond that, though, it's gone as well as I've hoped. The inputs have plenty of gain, sound decent, and have smooth action on the knobs. I'd like it if the combi-jacks were a little more solid feeling on plugging in a 1/4" plug, but that's subjective. 

Time to dig in and find out what this box can really do!