Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Expandability

I bought an M-Audio FireWire Solo with an employee discount back in... 2006, maybe? Earlier? Anyway, it did the trick but driver support was always kinda hit-and-miss. I ended-up trading it years later; to a friend who was going to use it to extend his existing interface, so no drivers required. In return, I got a TASCAM US-122MKII - not really an upgrade or a downgrade at the end of the day, but its drivers still worked so I was happy. It started randomly making some really weird noises lately though, so I figured I'd just bite the bullet and buy something proper instead of wondering if it was physically failing, its Windows 8 drivers just didn't work well with newer versions of Windows 10, or something else was up... 14 years or so is a good return on my initial investment, right? So my new Audient iD14 arrived last week (found a 5% discount code and free shipping), and it's very nice. My not-great M-Audio AV42 monitors, my also-not-great Hosa Pro HPR-X2 speaker cables, and my interesting-but-not-great M-Audio Nova mic are not doing the iD14 any favours; but it's really helping them out and is a great centrepiece to build around in the future.

I also opted for a 512GB ADATA SU800 to replace my 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 'cause it was under $100 CDN and shipped for free. Windows 10 2004 went on there, along with all of the games that were installed on my spinning drives - Anthem is ever-so-slightly better now :)

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