Ted Onyszczak |
With it's recent price drop,
it's now a better time than ever to examine the Edirol FA-101 Firewire audio interface.
This sleek, ruggedly housed unit is capable of 8 analog ins and outs. As well, stereo
digital in and out is also simultaneously available through optical toslink S/PDIF
connectors, for a total of 10 audio in and out.
It also comes equiped with 1 MIDI I/O for 16 channels of MIDI. The FA-101 will work up to
sample rates of 192khz, although it can only do 6 in and out at this rate. It also houses
two high quality mic pre's, one capable of hi-z guitar input as well, on the first two
front panel analog ins. All of the other ins and outs are 1/4" TRS connectors housed
on the back of the unit. There are many knobs for controling the input and output aspects
of this card on the front panel, inluding mic gain headphone volume and sample rate.
Handily it also sports a mix knob for continuosly mixing the input signal with the output
for no-latency monitoring, although this can also be done through ASIO driver control.
Digital Sync for input is easily handled by a dedicated button on the front panel, usefull
if you're coninuosly swapping digital input devices.
The other bottons are for switching to software monitoring control, and a mono switch,
handy for direct monitoring two mono sources on input 1 and 2. In normal mode each is hard
panned left and right for stereo sources, but the mono switch allows direct monitoring
mono sources in a centre image. And all this connects to your computer via a Firewire 400
cable, though there is a through port for daisy chaining further firewire devices.
That's the box, but how
does it work you ask? Our review unit has been used on a wide variety of computers. Mac
G4's and G5's and a Music XPC C1 PC system running Windows XP, SP1. In all cases it
performed flawlessly. We never experienced any hicups related to hardware. The audio
quality of the AD and DA converters on this box are far above what you would expect for a
unit at this price level.
They are smooth and clean and have excellent stereo imaging. The mic pre-amps are neutral
and solid, with no noticable degredation to the sound. You'll have to look elsewehere for
tube type colouring, but that's what the additional 6 inputs are for aren't they. Having a
separate headphone volume is incredibly handy for home recording applications, especially
if you jump from portable applications to a home studio with a mixer setup.
The only minor quibble is that you have to disconnect the unit briefly after switching
sample rates or ASIO buffer sizes, most other units have avoided this scenario. The
quality of the audio more than makes up for this, however. Plus this unit works real well
at low latency ASIO monitoring scenarios. Using for send and return to an external FX
unit, Cubase SX 3 clocked it at 7ms latency, with only a couple precentage CPU used on our
2.8 Ghz P4. The unit is dead simple to setup for novices, and judging by the fact that
they have yet to update it's driver, they got the code for it right the first time.
At $CDN 623 I can't recommend this unit enough. It sounds great, works great and is cheap.
If you need 8 ins and outs, and not a lot of extra pre-amp, then look no further than the
Edirol FA-101
Ted Onyszczak Product Page |
