Fraud and Idiotic Audio Interface Descriptions
Here’s how it works. I get up in the morning (or afternoon, unfortunately) and check the recording forum here at RecordingReview.com. There are usually a handful of new members who are asking for specific advice about a specific product. Typically, the audio interface is the least understood link in the chain so I take extra time to help with the audio interfaces.
Today on the forum a dude asked how many simultaneous inputs the Alesis Multimix 16 Firewire mixer / audio interface could send to the computer at once. In other words, how many tracks can he record simultaneously?
I head over to Musicians Friend and read the description. Of course, it’s all useless marketing hype with no clear indication of the features. (This is normal, UNFORTUNATELY!).
So, I head over to the Alesis website.
_Compact, affordable 16-channel analog mixer and Multi-channel FireWire Audio Computer
Compact? Really? WOW! (highest form of sarcasm possible). Thanks!
Affordable? Really? WOW! (like I can’t see the damn price is $500 at Musiciansfriend) Thank!
16-channel analog mixer? Okay, that’s useful. That means it probably has X amount of mic preamps and X amount of line level inputs, but that tells me something.
Here is the part that pissed me off so badly, that I actively refuse to EVER recommend another Alesis product again for the rest of my life. You have not only lost me as a customer for life, you have completely lost all of my recommendations.
“Multi-channel Firewire”
Let me say that again.
“Multi-channel Firewire”
On their own website they leave out the single most important piece of information possible for an audio interface. Are they out of their damn minds?????? How is it that a manufacturer of an audio interface can’t see the worth in being clear enough to illustrate the most important feature in an audio interface? I’m positive that there are some extremely intelligent electrical engineer and software engineers have designed this audio interface. I surely can’t do it! I tip my hat on my bald head to them.
However, what incompetent moron is in charge of writing the product descriptions for the Alesis website and Musiciansfriend? Fire them immediately! They are costing you money! Fire them. Go a step further. Put a hit out on them! This is so big of a mistake that it had to be on purpose. No one with any understanding of the product would possible leave out the number of simultaneous inputs. This has to be part of some bigger New World Order conspiracy or something. It makes no logical sense.
It’s Not Just Alesis – It’s M-Audio, Presonus, Mackie, Digidesign and Every Other Manufacturer Of Audio Interfaces
I’ve been planning on updating the Home Recording Soundcard Wizard to include the latest audio interfaces that have came out recently. Every time I start to go through each audio interface and deduce what features it has (yes, I have to use some kind of deductive reasoning to figure out the stupid features of a given product) I end angry. I’m angry because I want the information on my Soundcard Wizard to be accurate. I owe that to the visitors of RecordingReview.com. However, when they simply do not tell you ANYWHERE the number of simultaneous inputs and other features on the description of an audio interface, I don’t know what to do!
I believe in capitalism. (Don’t get started on another anti-socialist rant). I believe that the market caters to the demands of the customer. If a business does something in a strange way, it’s probably due to the fact that customers want it that way. What possible customer would have any interest in pulling out their credit card for a product that they have absolutely zero idea even does what they think it does?
This blows my mind!
Misleading Input Figures
Another problem which is almost as huge as not stating the number of inputs at all is the problem of over-inflating the number of inputs. Digital inputs should not count as the number of inputs in an audio interface! Why can’t the ad for the Presonus Firestudio (which I happily own) say “Featuring 8 analog inputs out of the box, but expandable to 26 simultaneous inputs with ADAT Lightpipe”. Instead, they just say “24 inputs”. Then they say “26 inputs”. (I guess they forgot to count S/PDIF the first time!) There is absolutely nothing on the Musiciansfriend Firestudio ad to suggest that without buying a bunch more stuff, you can only record 8 inputs at once. NOTHING! A beginner is completely screwed. You are going to pay $500-600 minimum for an 8 channel preamp / analog to digital converter with Lightpipe. Nowhere does the Firestudio say that it’s going to cost an additional $1000 to get up to 24 simultaneous inputs. Why keep this a secret? Since no one is being up front and honest about their audio interface products, it seems that if there was one company who laid it all out there, the buying public would be shocked by the straight forward nature of the company and the company would explode with sales!
I remember when I first bought my M-Audio Delta 1010 back in 2001. I was shocked to see that it did not have 10 inputs. It had 8 analog inputs and 2 S/PDIF, but no one told me that I would need to buy more stuff to take advantage of the other 2 inputs. If this wasn’t fraud, it was flat out intentional deception. (I think that is fraud!).
A Picture Is Worth A Million Trillion Words
I’m the kind of guy who likes to read. I LIKE books. (As long as they involve Nazis, the Cold War, or socialism.) I don’t mind reading a description of an audio interface. However, because the ad for the typical audio interface is so disgustingly uninformative, I have to look at the damn picture! Why! Am I 4 years old? I can color in the lines now. I should not have to recourse to looking at the back of the unit to figure out what an audio interface can and can’t do. The ad says “4,000 inputs made of gold for pristine fidelity” and the back of the unit has 8 holes for XLR mics and an ADAT input.
The bigger problem arises when the USB and Firewire mixers don’t specify how many ins and outs their audio interface portion contains. There is no back of the unit to look at! Obviously, the text in the ad and the website is going to be useless. It’s a guessing game as to whether the unit has 2 inputs or 16 inputs!
So, in this case a picture is not worth 1,000 words. Not when the words are useless! In fact, a picture is worth an infinite amount of words in this case, but I’d rather sound like a mafia dude who says “million trillion”.
Make It Easy On Beginners!
I’m curious just how many people start to consider jumping into home recording and then get confused by the unnecessary complications of audio interface ad writers that they say “Screw it!”. I bet the audio interface world is losing millions of dollars each year because they don’t accurately describe their products.
Tags: Audio Interface Alesis, Digidesign, M-Audio
February 17th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Go Brandon! I also have noticed recently that the “alternate” picture views on the online gear sites almost never show the back or whatever side you need to see to look at number of XLR inputs. It is usually some useless angle that doesn’t show you anything more than the first picture. This is a recent development. It seems to me there always used to be a “rear” view, not anymore.
Yeah, my Digi002 rack has “18 inputs!” and how many XLR preamps built into it????? Just 4. I hope the Mackie 12 channel interface lives up to its hype. 12 mic preamps in is really cool and pretty much all a band needs to record live.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I would agree that most ads are aimed right at the beginner who thinks, “A home studio for $200, I could save my band thousands if I get this.”
Your rant against the Multimix Firewire is not entirely true. According to the manual it can send 12-16 individual tracks to Cubase. The Multimix USB,(which is $200 less) sends 1 stereo mix.
I may be reading it wrong, but either way, you got a point on the rant. But a spin on this is if companies make a true “home studio in a box” with every type of preset known to man, that puts a lot of hard-working/studying engineers out of business. The challenge to go and learn a few things before expecting a Nickelback-quality recording can be a good thing.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Please be aware that you are not the only victim of manufacturer’s marketing-speak. The fact is, we have nothing to go on other than what they tell us, nor do we have the time or bandwidth to hand-test every piece of equipment out of a 45,000+ product inventory with hundreds of new products showing up every day. Whenever possible, we post a PDF of the product’s owner’s manual on the detail page for those who require more information. However, if the manual isn’t available at the time we create the detail page, most likely it will not find its way to our site. After all, we can’t track thousands of products over numerous manufacturer’s sites at random to see if they happened to post the manual on any given day — nor do they notify us when they do. Another thing they don’t bother to tell us is when they’ve made changes to a product or its specs. We have to find out the hard way; at the expense of our goodwill with a disappointed customer. For future reference, if our, or a manufacturer’s product detail page doesn’t provide all the information you seek, I’d suggest checking the Support or Downloads page on the manufacturer’s site to see if they’ve posted owner’s manuals.
By the way, the link you posted to Musician’s Friend connects to the MultiMix 16 USB, not the FireWire.
That said, the information you wanted is on the Alesis site under Support - Downloads. The MultiMix 12 FireWire manual, which also covers the MultiMix 16 says the following:
Channels sent from the MultiMix to the
Computer
The Firewire port sends every individual mixer channel as well as the MultiMix’s MAIN OUT/2-TRACK OUT left and right signals to the computer. This means that, for the MultiMix 12 FireWire, 12 individual channels are sent to the computer along with the MAIN stereo pair (14 channels in total.) For the MultiMix 16 FireWire, 16 individual channels are sent to the computer along with the MAIN stereo pair (18 channels in total.)
Individual channels
The INDIVIDUAL channels sent to the computer send the signal
after the preamp gain knob, the high-pass filter, the three-band EQ, and the channel fader. The effects of the AUX send knobs are NOT included in the outputs of the individual channels.
MAIN MIX channels
The MAIN mix channels sent to the computer exactly mirror the MAIN output of the mixer. If you are only interested in making stereo recordings, consider recording the MAIN channels in your recording software.
I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced, and hope that this information will bring us to an accord of sorts — after all, asking that I put out of work, made homeless, and starve to death, or better yet, shot by a hit man over a $500 toy is just a tad harsh…
Best Regards,
-B-
February 20th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
I’m a beginner trying to pick out an interface and I didn’t think about it until I read this, but I almost always ignore the writing on the page and just click the picture so I can see how many inputs a unit actually has. Adds unnecessary confusion and frustration to the whole process.
February 20th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Props to you, this was very good.
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 pm
I totally agree with you, actually about five years ago I got screwed into buying the eight channel alesis usb multimix and couldn’t for the the life of me figure out why i couldnt record using all eight channels. These companies just do whatever to make you think the product is better than it is……
February 23rd, 2008 at 2:25 pm
http://www.echoaudio.com echo cards give very good specs.
February 24th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I agree. When I got my fw410, I was pissed that it can only record 2 analog inputs at a time (though I do record off of Toslink … almost never … so that’s good).
I think some of it is getting better. I was pleasantly surprised to see M-Audio’s NRV10 properly described as an 8×2 analog mixer and 10×10 software assisted interface.
The worst one I’ve seen so far is the A&H Zed-14. It’s USB equipped, but I had to read in a review, that the USB only carries the buses. Not individual inputs. I couldn’t find that ANYWHERE on their website, not even pdfs and white papers.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Presets don’t work, but assuming that they did, I see absolutely no correlation between audio interface manufacturers being up front and honest and about the specs and features in their audio interface and getting some kind of audio hand out.
I think that’s my point. I’ve got my hands tied doing so many things to improve the quality of the recordings coming out of my place that I don’t have time to dig and dig and dig to investigate the most important features.
Brandon
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I almost feel like i wrote this article yesterday, after hours of researching audio interfaces (primarily by presonus and mackie). Mackie’s firewire mixers don’t have direct firewire connection. You have to buy a flippin’ $500 card to insert into the back of the mixer to connect to your pc through firewire. THEY DON’T FLIPPIN SAY A THING ABOUT THIS A-N-Y-W-H-E-R-E!!! You have to put the peices together yourself. so, i’m sure many people have spent $1300 on the mackie 1640, only to realize that it really did not have firewire i/o built in. (……….)