Hello all!
Hope all is well with everyone?

I just recently acquired an Akai EIE interface.And am thinking of replacing my current soundcard with it.

I am curious has anyone else used one of these? And how do they compare with others? Pros? Cons? Any help or info is greatly appreciated.

I got it for very cheap from a friend.$50 I haven't hooked it up yet because I need a few cables.
But I'm sure it will be better than my onboard Realtek.

I'm running Win 7 Pro 64 Bit.I use Cubase 7 Elements,FL 11,PT 10,Live 9 Suite,and others.
But mainly I just kinda want to know how the sound quality is? And does it play well with Asio4All and 64 bit Daw's?

I'll mainly be using it for recording my hardware synths.And as a soundcard instead of the onboard.I have a usb mic for now.
But I plan to get an XLR condenser of some sort soon.But for now this usb Samson Go mic works great.

This interface looks pretty awesome,it's stout,rugged,heavy,and pretty large.It has a lot of ports,usb's and it's own midi interface.

I basically just need two 1/4" mono male to rca female adapters to hook it to my speakers.
And 2 xlr cables to hook it up to the balanced outs of my Behringer mixer.(I figured that would sound best )

Anyway any advice is greatly appreciated.Thanks to all in advance!

You guys are the best!

 

Greetings LEVITATE
It will sound better than your stock sound card. Never having owned one or even having heard one and based solely on the reviews of EIE, not one ever mentioned the sound quality as a selling point, rather, they mostly intone that it gets the job done, period. That said, why don't you save up your money, and when you can afford to purchase one get a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2. It will sound good and the drivers won't let you down 99 percent of the time. It is nice to have a friend that has given you the ability to upgrade the quality of your sound for the 50 dollars, though within hopefully a year you can significantly improve upon this basic foundation by getting the Focusrite. That said, go make some great music with the tools presently at your disposal. A great song can be written on the most inexpensive of equipment and a terrible song on the loftiest.

 

What I remember, you have the basic one which retails for < $100 (I believe the red one) and the 'Pro' one which goes for $ 200 or something. (Depends on country and all of course). The basic one is limited to 44.1 khz / 16bit which is a shame to be honest. The Pro one goes up to 24bit / 96khz.

I haven't seen official reviews mention this, but from users on guitarampmodeling.com and others the latency seems to be quite OK for an USB device. It can compete on latency with the other good USB devices (but USB devices will always have higher latency than firewire or PCI or something). I just can't remember if they had to use ASIO4ALL or the official ASIO drivers to get it working (maybe it didn't even have official ASIO drivers).

None the less, it worked OK. The mic pre's weren't what you call 'wow' but they weren't bad either. Better than on cheap Behringer mixers. Maybe the same level (or a bit better even) than on recent Behringer FCAxxx interfaces.

If you're working with a regular sound card, this will be better. If you really want to record stuff through the line-in and mic-in's I suggest getting at least the Pro version. 24bit makes your life easier when recording.

I once thought I needed more mic inputs and started looking at interfaces and the pro one was on my list. Seemed decent enough and price-wise there was no other interface with 4 mic inputs. But if you wouldn't need the 4 mic inputs, there are better devices out there with 2 mic inputs which offer better mic pre's and converters.

All this is talking about the black 'Pro' model, like I said, 44.1khz / 16bit was a no-way-!!! kinda thing for me so I wouldn't look at the red one.

Then again, if you're only working with samples and only need the output you wouldn't care much about 24bit input... but then a device with 4 mic pre's would be overkill anyway :P.

 

For 50, nothing better!
I like the usb hub!
Cant talk about the driver, but it seams good and about the imputs its really do not matter much if you intend to buy preamps (recommended)