Bought "Refurbished" by Mackie at T. .. to € 98 with 3 year warranty. Apart from these promotional campaigns to clear the inventory, the product is no longer in the catalog ... Longer possible drivers of change in

- What characteristics have motivated your choice?
The quality of the preamps (60dB of gain with a noise-130dB: best figures in its class). The phantom power supply (as all its competitors ...). The presence of the DSP is for me a gadget that I do not. on the other hand I appreciate the build quality and sturdiness of the case because it is caused to move ... It changes the competitor that I was eyeing (E-MU 0404 USB).

The limitations of the USB1 .1 do not bother me too much because I currently use the 44.1 or 48k. I think it is wrong to say that this interface supports 96k given the state of drivers for the deal and the fact that 96k you can not make soft monitoring. Saw what was reflected in the forums regarding the difficulty of installation on PC and the poor quality of drivers, I crossed my fingers and counted on to use the opportunity to return free of charge in the 30d that gives me Th ...
Maybe in a while I find the limit of two entries like too much?

- For what purpose?
Live recording of mainly classical music + some kind of studio work. Hence my search for an optimum quality of preamps and AD converters

- What is your config (Motherboard / CPU / Ram / Hard ,...)?
Laptop Fujitsu-Siemmens XP Pro SP2 512M ram, 60G HD

- Which instruments and systems (console, preamp, DTD ...) you use it and how connections? ...
MBHO condenser microphones + connect to the monitor output of a hi-fi amplifier (Jack - RCA). I feared a little passage of the connector to RCA Jack symmetric asymmetric, but no problem and as you may easily adjust the level is nickel

UTILIZATION

- The installation is done it without problems?
No problem if you use a USB port that does not share interrupts with something else. Then I installed the drivers / app / 7 BETA firmware available on the site without any problems (see below)

- Have you experienced any incompatibilities?
Once it is installed into a USB port, do not try to connect the XD-2 on another port, it does not work. So we must choose a port at the start

- The general configuration is easy?
Once we understand the use of the USB button, YES

- The manual is clear and sufficient? ...
Yes because I am fluent in English, otherwise there on the net that a French translation of the installation guide

GETTING STARTED

- The drivers are stable?
I did not install because I use Tracktion Samplitude Music Studio and Tracktion seems to far below rated capacity of editing, mixing, processing.
The ASIO drivers are recognized and fairly stable. Sometimes you have to reset the XD-2 for sound input, but once it works it's ok (3 / 4 hours of continuous recording without problems)

- Are they often updated?
No and it will not happen again. Mackie has been a big problem with outsourcing the development of its drivers. They have now taken over this activity internally, but too late to SPIKE. So if it works it's ok, if it is to move on. In particular, the drivers are not Vista compatible theoretically. A complex manipulation is described on the Mackie forum to get through the installation on Vista. I have no experience because right now I am running XP and saw the purchase price of the risk is relatively low.

- What you get lag?
In my config, it's really not the strong point. First in the configuration of the ASIO driver, the buffer size increases from 256 to 10,204 (512 missing). 256-I errors around 1024 and it is ok but too important to the monitoring soft ... I have no use for recording classical and saw an opportunity to determine the amount of direct monitoring and mixing the tracks played. So as my main goal is not to have an error in recording sessions for long, I put the buffer to 2048 and everything runs nickel.

- How many tracks you get to record / play time? ...
2 mono tracks or a stereo recording ... normal since the map
Not had the opportunity to go beyond two dozen tracks in reading. No pb with the value of the buffer Asio I have adopted

OVERALL OPINION

- How long have you use it?
3 weeks. Two big concerts to be recorded next we. We'll see if it gives all that I expect

- What is so special that you like most and least?
Most: quality preamps and converters, beyond my expectations. I discovered the qualities of silence and smoothness of my microphones. Fishing incredible headphone output very useful in recording situation together. Input / output SPDIF for the link with all these old devices that are the DATS, CD players etc ...
Cons: some difficulties to get sound input. We must identify a procedure that works and stick there. Do not hesitate to reboot the XD-2 as soon as we found an anomaly.
Plop in the intermittent playback 44.1k that do not seem to come from an overload of the computer. Very annoying if you use this card for listening to music, but it's not my case. Once we made sure that plop these are not present on the recording, you can forget them.

- Have you tried many other models before buying it?
I used to be a tiny UCA202 Behringer (16 bits without preamp). It's still day and night in terms of sound and ability, especially considering the price of my SPIKE
- How would you rate the quality / price?
Excellent in my case
- With experience, you do again this choice? ...
Yes immediately because I have a laptop that works on XP nickel, but the move to Vista could spell the end of this interface.

So my overall score is mitigated by the fact of the life of this interface, but for the sound, I think it is at the interfaces around € 400 500