Don't Buy M-Audio

I make piano recordings in my home studio. As the audio interface — the analog to digital converter — I originally used an M-Audio USB Duo ... and I created this page in the hopes that nobody else will ever have to.

To be fair, when it worked, it sounded good. But it constantly caused kernel panics and complete freeze-ups (in the year that I used it, I hardly rebooted my computer for any reason other than an upgrade or the Duo). It never even worked at all when recording in Peak.

Possibly even worse, it recorded with a nasty buzzing artifact that seemed to be the result of the Duo initializing itself on the wrong foot. If I just flipped the settings back and forth half a dozen times, forcing it to reinitialize, the problem eventually would go away (at least until my next recording session). Unfortunately, the only way to tell that the buzzing had gone was by recording something. So setting up to record involved a cycle of record / listen / reset / record / listen / reset that sometimes went on for five or ten minutes.

In fixing this problem, M-Audio provided tech support that ranged between polite but unhelpful, rude and unhelpful, and outright incompetent. At one point — this was during the “get rid of the difficult customer by trying to convince him he shouldn't expect our product to actually work” phase of their support process — I had to email them a scan of their own manual to convince them that my computer met their published specs. This whole process culminated in me shipping the unit back to them for repair, and them sending me an entirely new unit ... with exactly the same problem. When I expressed bewilderment on the phone, it turned out that not only had they not reproduced the problem, but had never even tried, and were rather surprised by the idea that one would do such a thing.

At the end of it all, I just wrote off the Duo as a bad purchase, and picked up a Presonus Firepod. It is superb — sounds better than the Duo (lower noise floor), no crashes, and, well, it works.

If you're considering a product by M-Audio, I'd steer you away from it: their products are sketchy, their drivers are buggy, and their support team will become your worst enemy.