Gadgetory

what's up YouTube welcome back once again to my studio here on tech of tomorrow now today we're going to be taking a look at a product that I feel that any entry-level musician out there and in fact even some pro musicians would probably get a great kick and find a lot of use out of this brand-new product for Mike a multimedia now this is the axe IO it's a 24 bit 192 kilohertz interface has a dynamic range of 117 DB it's got all kinds of great features on it it comes to market at about three hundred and forty nine dollars and for the price I think by the end of the video you're gonna be going wow this thing really does have a lot of great features for that price range now sure there's stuff out there that's a lot more expensive and they add stuff out that might be a little bit better but this particular product I think fetching this perfect niche especially for people who are entry-level like I said who don't have a lot of money but need the functionality to be able to do everything they want all in a little tiny box now this particular box hooks up by USB it also has a power unit that you plug into the wall so it does need it doesn't need the AC power it doesn't work off strictly just standalone um USB power but it will work with a PC it'll work with Mac it's very easy to simply open up and use so when you open up the box and you check the product out from usually getting the product there's not a whole lot in the box you get pretty much the product you get the user's manual you get a cable for hooking it up to your computer and that's pretty much it all of your drivers all the stuff that you're doing you'll be downloading off of the iocai multimedia site it's very easy you just register your product install it and then you're up and going now also before I jump in just short knew all the features the software pack that comes with this is pretty amazing because you get the amplitude you get their latest their latest software and it's the deluxe version of amplitude 4 so you pretty much get all this great software you get this t rack stuff and we'll jump in that a little bit later but all in all inside of this box you get actually almost as much software as the value of the unit and a lot of ways you could pretty much say hey I'm buying this unit and the little BOTS itself is almost free you get all this software so let's jump in real quick though let's check out the unit and just talk a lot about how this units really cool what it can do for you guys I've already got the unit plugged in and everything this way you guys can see all the lights and all the stuff on it but you guys will see right off the bat on the front it's very easy to see and use now on the front you'll see it there's actually two different quarter-inch inputs and as you travel down you'll also see it there is a headphone jack as well as a place where you can actually react everything which is really incredible now what's very interesting on the very far left on the quarter inch input you get some very interesting stuff for one thing you get this feature called Z tone now Z tone actually only does work off the cordilla input to the far left it doesn't work in the secondary one although both of those actually have their own separate game the Z tone is only for the very first plug-in and what's really interesting about this is you can actually change the impedance of your microphone and this is something that you really do not see on units that are this inexpensive honestly this is something you see on things that are really expensive and it's a really cool thing because let's just say that you plug in either a mic or your guitar and you're not very happy with how the sound is you think it's either too dead or it's too bright with the Z tone you can actually change the impedance of your microphone to make either hotter or less hot until you find the absolute best sound that you like now also right below that you can see there's also two other sets of controls now one is passive active I think most people are going to know what this is for this is if you have a passive or active guitar and if you actually have a passive guitar and you plug it in and you turn into active you're gonna notice that the volume automatically drops because it's being padded by 10 DB automatically for active pickups now right next to the active passive switch you'll see there's another switch next to this is the pure and the j FET switch now when it's in the pure mode this means it's not coloring your sound whatsoever you're getting just the pure sound of the guitar and when you engage the J fit button you're adding a little bit of mids into the mix although I couldn't really hear that much of a difference I'm sure it's doing something on a sonic level or it wouldn't be there now as we move on to the middle of the unit you're gonna see right here that there's a button that says preset and then you're gonna have a tuner right next to that now one thing I want to talk to you guys about the preset is that this particular function does not work unless you have it hooked up to the MIDI controller even though it seems like it should work I tried using inside of standard features I end up calling the people over at Ike a multimedia where I was informed that this particular button the preset button which allows you to scroll through all of the different settings can only be done if you have it hooked up through MIDI that is actually one aspect of this unit that I thought was just a little bit kind of which I say is kind of a small caveat I honestly think you should be able to use it you know when you have it hooked up to USB you should be able to control and scroll through all these things but I guess it's kind of meant more for if you hook it up to like you know an iRig type pedal or something like that that you can scroll all through them so it's not the end of the world because you're at your DAW you can actually scroll through all that stuff without any problem whatsoever and if you're using a microphone that happens to need phantom power just below the preset knob is the 48 phantom bolt power button and right next to that is the tuner button and even though the tuner may seem like a trivial function to some people it's actually not you really do need the tuner because when you're in the studio you want to make sure that your guitar is as tuned up as possible so when you're doing your recording you don't know if somebody listen to it the other end and say my god did this dude even tune his guitar so it's actually a very important feature now sitting right next to the tuner you can see there's a button that says monitor control and one thing that I think is really cool about this unit is not only can it be used for your direct inbox and for all your effects you can also use it pretty much as a standalone interface because you can hook up your speakers to it and you can control the volume with it through the monitor control and next to that you also see a headphone jack so you can use headphones to listen to everything now one thing that I thought was just a little bit confusing about the unit is if you look at there I guess what you want to call their description they claim that the unit has two inputs and five outputs and that's actually technically incorrect when we go around and we take a look at the back of the unit you guys can see that they're actually five on the back yes there are there are four outputs for the speakers and the USB that makes five but Plus on the front you have a headphone out and you have the amp out jack now the amp out jack is somewhat important a lot of people might say oh my god that's not that big of a deal but honestly I think this is one of the biggest deals about the ax i/o is the very fact that recording both a digital signal and a live signal has been proven if you watch online to give the absolute best clarity and the best sound so once you go in and you find the preset and everything that you like and you record it on to your DAW and then after that you can use the amp out connection on the front and you can put this directly to your cabinet so then you can mic up your cabinet and record your live sound and mix it with your digital sound in your dog this is actually a really cool feature I have a much more expensive it's called a one torpedo this particular product was about eight hundred dollars and it has less features than this product at three hundred and forty nine dollars and to the far right you guys can see there are actually two XLR jacks now these use pure mic preamps and they sound really nice are they the absolute best on the market probably not but for somebody who wants an all-in-one box these particular connections can be a lifesaver because inside of the software there's actually all kinds of different effects that you can use to mix your vocals compress them and make them sound exactly like you want them to sound without spending really any more money on software or hardware now next to that you can see there are four output jacks these are all four different types of speakers and then next to that there are actually two more inputs and these are for expression pedals so you can actually hook up two expression pedals at the same time so one could be a volume pedal one could be expression pedal and you can use those directly into the axe i/o then we see the USB plug in all you do is hook your speak up to this and then plug it into your system install the drivers and like I said you're up and going then to the left of that you can see there are two MIDI controllers you have MIDI in MIDI Aden and like I said once again earlier in the video to use all of the functions and to be able to scroll through all the different settings that you have you will need to have it hooked up through the MIDI device next to that we see the power connection and then the far left we simply see the on and off button and there's also a little Kensington switch so if you want to lock this up so someone doesn't steal it from your office you can do that as well alright so there you have it you guys can see that the unit itself actually has a lot of features there's pretty much everything that you can need on the unit with us you're plugging in a guitar whether you're plugging in a mic you have all the features you need to go into your recording studio and actually Accord your band and get up and going now let's talk about something else though because the software package that comes inside of the Axio is really nice you get amplitude 4 deluxe this is a great software package it has so many different guitar emulations cab immolations just pretty much anything that you can think of for your vocals your bass or guitar you're gonna find it inside of this package and if you want more stuff you can go you can go buy it until you build up your library to have as much as you want now you also get tea racks as well and tea racks is really cool because these are all the different effects the different effects excuse me that you're gonna want to use when you're recording like your guitar your vocal like I said you can have things like compressors delays Flanders any even it you want you're gonna be able to find in here and you're gonna be able to use it in your mix now the one thing that I found to be a little bit of a caveat is the fact that when you actually do record with amplitude and you're recording it into your DAW it doesn't actually print what you're recording so if you actually took that that you know you took your your software and you took your project file and you took it you know somewhere else to play it when they went to go play it back there's not gonna be any guitar in there it's just gonna be the raw guitar tracks with nothing printed on it so you're gonna have to render the track to actually get the track you know done but then afterwards with that with being able to react everything you just simply use that jack in the fron plugged into your re-record and you can have the best of both worlds like I said before but the software package itself is worth a really a whole lot of money now right here you guys can see what the interface is gonna look like on your computer it's very simple to use you can scroll through everything there's actually like a control panel which tells you what's hooked up and what's going on it's very intuitive and simple to use you don't have to have any kind of rocket science degree everything is right there in front of you and it's really simple to use in this particular video I could honestly be on here for hours talking to you guys about all of the different sounds and plugins and everything that's inside of the Axio but I want to focus today really on the hardware features of the axe IO and what it has to offer but for those people out there who are wondering hey was it kind of sound like we'll check this out Jesus the cameraman he decided to write a little ditty so he programmed a little bit of drums and record this little ditty and it was very simple and easy to use so let's just real quick let's just take a listen to this little ditty written by mr. G another thing that's actually really cool about the Axio software package is let's just say you're a person out there and you're totally starting off and you don't even have any kind of recording software whatsoever well guess what I can multimedia has you covered here as well because you get Ableton Live light inside that's right so right when you get the unit even if you do not have any recording software whatsoever guess what you'll have it now so all you have to do is go ahead and install the Ableton Lite live and then you've got yourself all your DAW software that you need so as long as you have your computer whether it's a PC or Mac it's probably better if you have a newer PC or Mac the older you know units that are out there will probably run stuff it'll probably run it a little bit sluggish so you know if you're you know wondering like hey will this run on my really old computer well it probably will but it'll probably run a little sluggish it's probably better if you get a newer computer but all in all the software it's up I just have to just like them countless to the ground is worth almost as much as the unit if not more than the unit itself and the unit just has so many features like I said to the entire video from the ability to change the impedance of your microphone to the ability to change it to Jay Fedor pure to be able to use active passive this is pretty much like a di box that's also gonna be your main interface and everything else all in a package that's three hundred and forty nine dollars using it is very simple it's an absolutely great product I kept trying to find things to really like you know beat this product up because I know that you guys don't don't like it if you say good things about stuff they always want to have some negative in there so the negative things really about this unit are really just this the fact that it doesn't print on the first time out when you're recording I think that's a particularly I wish it printed right off the bat but that's really no big deal beyond that the very fact that you have to use the MIDI controller to scroll through all the presets I wish that was a little bit different I wish that no matter what you're doing you could just use that preset button on the front of the but that can only be used with the MIDI that's not actually quite explained anywhere clear on their side or any other documentation so that is something that you guys should definitely know so if you're giving it you're like oh I want to be able to scroll through all of these presets in the front of the unit well you're going to be happy to use those two MIDI input output jacks and a MIDI controller to be able to do that not the end of the world but you know just something to take note of the bottom line here though is that this product is three hundred and forty nine dollars and for three hundred and forty nine dollars you get a box that's completely functioning for everything that you need it'll work like I said as your di box you can have active you can have passive you can change the impedance of your microphone you can hook up speakers you can amp it out I mean there are just so many features in here for the three hundred forty nine dollars and with all the software bundle you get on top of this I have to say that for anybody out there who's looking for an all-in-one solution doesn't want to spend a money this is a very quality product is it the absolute most expensive and you know you know most most uber grand product on the market no it's not but it's definitely affordable it works great it's easy to use the software package is great here on TECA tomorrow I definitely think that the Axio is a serious editor's choice product it has everything that anybody needs to get up and going in their recording studio simply easily efficiently and effectively like usual we'll have links down below or if you guys want to check out some more information about this unit or purchase one for yourself will do so also if you'd like to see a video digging more into the sounds and that type of stuff let me know and I'll bring that video to the table but I just thought that you guys should definitely know what the I came multimedia Axio is what it does and what a great price it is i'm Elric you've been watching teching tomorrow we'll see you guys back here on the channel for more tech