If you have a laptop, think very carefully before you buy anything with “Digidesign” written on it.

I picked up an Mbox 2 Mini in late January. “Marvellous”, thought me. “I can dip my toes into the wonderful world of Pro Tools, and have a portable USB interface to use with the laptop”. It was quite expensive compared to the non Digi hardware, but that’s the price you pay for quality… err, right?

Pshaw.

I had some audio work to do this weekend just gone, and I was away from home. The perfect opportunity to use my nifty little USB doohickey. Loaded in the ASIO/WDM drivers, and the strangest thing happened – the CPU meter pegged up to 100% and stayed there until I shut down the audio application. “That is rather odd”, thought I. After quite a bit of hunting around, I came across a rather enlightening discussion on Digidesign’s support forum.

After acknowledging the problem, a Digidesign representative promises to investigate, and later informs people that they are working on a fix. Then they return (after a lengthy delay), not with a solution, but rather to inform the large number of unhappy customers that this is infact a feature, not a bug. Apparently the variable CPU speeds of some mobile chipsets offends the delicate sensibilities of the sensitive new age Digi drivers, so they just bung a 100% load on the CPU all the time so it doesn’t get a chance to slow down.

What it does do is heat up. Quickly. Then of course the fan kicks in – so you end up trying to record audio on a machine that’s uncomfortably hot to touch, and sounds like a Boeing taxiing for take-off. The fan I could live with (although it’s rather frustrating), but the heat is un-tenable. It will shorten the life of the hardware, and as far as I’m concerned that is beyond the point where it’s acceptable.

The funny thing is, I then installed the tiny, free Asio4all driver, and everything ran absolutely bulletproof using the laptop’s built in sound chip. The altruistic spare-time coder trumps the monolithic industry standard.

Again.