AKAI EIE Pro

[copacetic]

http://www.akaipro.com/eiepro

Anyone know about these things? I can't find much real world information on them, on account of just being recently released, I guess.

Looks awesome to me.

[the all new rob]

My customer support experience with Akai Pro (which is also Alesis and Ion and maybe a couple other brands) has been bad enough for me to never buy another product from them.

After filling out an online contact form (which required creating an account on their site), they sent me a blank form that I had to *fax* in to make the initial support request, which apparently was launched into the void, as I never got any reply. It was/is farcical.

[plamuk]

My customer support experience with Akai Pro (which is also Alesis and Ion and maybe a couple other brands) has been bad enough for me to never buy another product from them.

same. terrible support. they do not care about their users.

[copacetic]

Damnit.

If it works, I don't really care about this aspect at all, to be honest.

It's just weird, there doesn't seem to be anyone on the planet who has actually used the festering thing.

[markheath]

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone that is using this thing. A couple of interestng featres caught my attention that I haven't seen on other audio devices before:

- it has a USB hub on it. Could prove useful when working with laptops that have very limited number of USB ports. Not sure whether using them would cause glitching at low latencies.

- it appears that they have opted not to write their own drivers for this at all, prefering to make it a class compliant device. This means there are no ASIO drivers - you would use WDM instead in Windows. Theoretically this should at least mean that the drivers are very stable - no bluescreens or bundled crapware. Not sure how low latency it would work at though.

[Kenny]

Other than the two things Markheath said, what exactly is the selling point of this over other similar interfaces?

to me, the hub, meh... if I needed a hub, I can get a hub. But can they be daisy chained through the hub? That's a whole different story. As a single interface it's not usefull to me, but being able to daisy chain 4 together might make it a viable option, at least for a kind of "upgrade path."

also I don't see using WDM over ASIO as a selling point. Drivers stable? maybe. But what about latency? It's been a while since I've needed to use WDM drivers, but isn't their latency terrible?