Akai EIE Electromusic Interface Expander

I'm very satisfied with this great audio interface. It's incredibly beautiful, very well builted and works perfectly! The vintage visual it's amazing and the analog VU meters turns it even beautiful. It's a unique feature at this price. The body it's very solid and resistent. It has a great performance, with a very low latency. The built-in USB hub it's another great feature, vey helpful for more than one midi controller or USB device. Keeps the table more organized. It works perfectly in my home studio and for my eletronic music productions, and is incredibly beautiful Strongly recommended!

this is a decent, cheap piece of equipment. Recording quality is fine (I am pretty new to recording/mixing) and it hasn't broken on me yet after a year of owning it and constantly transporting it from place to place. I also really like how the phantom power is divided between the inputs, which is a nice feature I don't see on many mixers in this price range. It isn't split between all four individually, but each pair of inputs (1/2 and 3/4) has their own phantom circuit. this is seriously excellent for recording a room since you can have a ribbon mic along with a dynamic mic in 1/2 (to pick up vocals or instruments) and a condenser or two in 3/4 with the phantom juice flowin' to capture the noise in the air or an acoustic instrument that would otherwise get lost in the milieu of amplified tones. However, the interface is fairly confusing once you want to start monitoring the inputs. Also, if you turn the volume knob all the way down on the four main input knobs, it seems like sound still leaks through pretty easily so there's no real "kill point" in terms of volume for any given channel. As well, 4 channels just really is not a lot after some time with the device, I have the 16-bit and 24-bit interface (the EIE and EIE pro) and I ended up using both of them to record a band so I could give the drums the mics they needed along with bass, guitar, and vocals. This in itself turned out to be kind of annoying since the EIE doesn't use a special driver, but the EIE pro does and thus they become incompatible in an ASIO setting, which means you either need to have two hosts set up to record from either interface or have a friend with another computer next to you with whom you can synchronize recordings :) As well, it can be kind of sensitive to power fluctuations. I had an SSD in my tower and whenever this interface was plugged in, there would be loud *SNAPS* in the recordings every so often which you can sort of fix with compression/EQ but still just tend to cut through everything else. However, the SSD died on me after only like 8 months of use so it may have been an issue with that specific SSD so ymmv. Drivers work fairly well in OSX and Windows (never hooked it to a Linux box), although some folks have had issues with them and they are not updated very often. Also, a quick note is that when you are downloading the drivers from Akai's website you can literally just fill out the "contact info" they require with jibberish and it will still give you the download. 4 stars for working fairly well and the fact that my SSD anecdote is most likely irrelevant. Like I said in the title, just some loose ends.

Coming out of the box, it seems like a solid, well built unit with all the features one could want. 4 inputs and outputs, MIDI in/out, 4 sends, cool VU meters, and a USB hub! Unfortunately it's hindered by a couple of showstopping defects: The drivers are awful. I used 2.2.5 (for Mac OS X), and the control panel would not let me change the buffer length. It randomly disconnects and reconnects. It momentarily disappears from the audio drivers menu before reappearing, while making a faint "popping" noise through your speakers. Obviously, random disconnects of your audio device throw your DAW for a loop, at best stopping the sound and at worst crashing the whole thing. Sometimes when I connect it, the latency is great and I can record with no problem. Other times, it appears to have a half-second lag in both recording and playback. Unmanageable. Sometimes it seems like it sets its own buffer length way too short, because all the sound coming out is crackly and lo-fi. Or it might be truncating the 24-bit recording down to 16-bits. I don't know for sure, but either way it sounds AWFUL and you can't use it. All of these problems are present with nothing plugged into the USB hub on the back, but I noticed the more USB devices you add, it gets even worse. Finally, when I initially got it all 4 inputs worked, but after 2 days the first input stopped working completely. Even when disconnected from a computer, you can directly monitor the inputs with your headphones and watch the VU needle bounce. On my unit, this works for inputs 2, 3, and 4, but not 1, even with the gain cranked all the way up. In short, my unit was unusable.

I have been on the forums as many have noted. I found their technical support guys to be pretty responsive. Responsive enough for me to keep on trying. Oddly though, it was the Sweetwater guys (Thanks Bob!) that gave me some ideas on testing the unit to identify the problem (was it me, or was it the unit). When I gave the test results to Akai, they concluded the unit was the problem and now I am waiting on an RMA to send it in. [Wished I had returned it to Amazon in the 30 days instead of trying to get it right with Akai]. In the mean time I discovered that it will not work, yet, with Apple Mavericks. they are working on a fix, but it is not here yet. So if you have not bought this unit, and you want strong pre-amps for your guitars, look for something else If you are on Mac Mavericks, look for something else. If you bought it from Amazon in the past 30 days or less, return it now!. If you are stuck with it, bug their tech support as much as possible, and cross your fingers. The unit is very rugged, and I like the quality of every aspect. It seems to be designed better than its price would suggest. But it just doesn't seem quite ready if you are using it on a Mac platform. Hopefully I will be able to amend this review in the near future and give it more stars.

the product doesn't really match the company's reputation needs to be updated great design just needs a little bit more work

I received the EIE pro a day before a touring musician arrived in town for a outdoor venue. Note that I decided for the Pro over the normal EIE for the recording capacity (the pro being 24-bit with the EIE just being 16). I was keen to see how the EIE held up in a outdoor setting; Outdoor venues being slightly more cumbersome to live recording provided the traditional hardware setup. The Neutrik Combo Connector XLR-1/4" Jack actually came in handy because the house live sound engineer gave me two XLR cables that had looked like they had been dragged behind a car for a few miles. In fact the male jack on the cable were so worn and banged up, they wouldn't even fit in the interface. so I just pulled out my 25ft Gold TRS popped it right in and handed the other connection to the engineer. The gig went off without a hitch. I mean literally I had no problems whatsoever no dropouts, no latency issues, I even stuck an external webcam to the extra USB ports while recording. just to see if I could get a hiccup. I got nothing. EIE pro went on effortlessly, Vu meters showing real time the available headroom which completely synced to the digital headroom meters in my mDaw Mind you this is during a live performance(read: one take. no stopping). So the EIEpro passed the live gig test with flying colors. Afterwards I originally planned to transfer the files to my Studio's DAW where I have a full suite managed by a Focusrite Saffire PRO24but instead I used the same setup to mixdown and and provide the artist with a copy of his performance. all using the EIEpro. In my opinion as a Consultant this External Sound Card Is Definitely worth its weight and is essential to the mobile Digital Media Artist.

Honestly I believe this device is awesome! I would love to give it 5 stars but honestly the fact that it comes with Pro-Tools and the hell it put me through... yea not so much fun. I am still playing with it to try to figure out how to get the most out of it but honestly so far it does what it was meant to do. the speed is there it's just pro-tools that is what sucks. I purchased this to go with Music Creator 6 Touch (Steam purchase) only to find out that MC6T only allows 2 inputs at a time! I still honestly may contact Steam and the BBB about that as NOWHERE in the documentation on the page to purchase discusses the number of inputs... oh it says 16 tracks but NOTHING about (at 2 at a time MAX). Apparently they want you to jump up to more expensive packages. So because of that I went ahead and decided "why not" and installed the Pro-Tools included in the package... One and a half hours later I was able to plug in and record. About 10 minutes after that I found out that the Pro-Tools bundled with this doesn't even export to MP3 without purchasing more software. So be prepared to run through a very convoluted DRM (via USB Dongle and associated websites and software) scheme in order to get the software even running and then after that another 20 minutes or so getting the lame-mp3 encoder installed and working. Now my whole reason for buying this was that I wanted to do a little recording here and there but have the option to also record multiple vocals at the same time (this being a 4x4 input device). So after getting Pro-Tools installed and recording something I decided to listed to what I recorded... CAN'T. Apparently this is because Pro-Tools only will output back to this device as OUTGOING AUDIO. So even if you have normal PC speakers/headphones good luck. You cannot even plug in headphone cables to this on the "headphone monitoring" ports. Pro-Tools will only send to the Monitor OUTs on the back of the unit. So honestly I am off to find some software that will do 4 in as well as just let me listed to the playback in my normal headphones/speakers (I am not looking to setup a professional studio). Lastly the build on this is just great! Everything is labeled well and it is straight forward to understand. My only complaint with this unit itself is similar to what others have said... CABLE PORTS SHOULD BE ON THE BACK OF THE UNIT NOT THE FRONT! At first I didn't realize how much of a hassle it is but then after rigging everything up... yea real easy to understand how annoying real quick. If you are getting this for long term usage... build yourself a little stand to run the cords down & under to head out the back... you will be thankful you did.

Installed the EIE Pro, updated the drivers from the AKAI Web site, was ready to also update the firmware but it was already with the latest version. Works Perfectly and I am using it as my main sound card and also with Presonus Studio One for recording. It seems that now the drivers are good to go. This is a 4in/4out audio interface so a lot of possibilities. I do not use the AVID Pro Tools Express which is included as I am a Presonus Studio One user but this is a tremendous value for folks not having a DAW. As other folks said built like a tank. AKAI includes a functional schematic of the EIE Pro on the last page of the user's guide and it really explains the function of the different knobs and channels routing as the text explanations are not detailed enough