The inputs on my X-Station blew up on Tuesday during a session. So I decided to get something a bit more serious.

Did a trip to Turnkey that resulted in the usual disappointment and frustration as they tried to sell me dodgy desktop thingies, or stuff that they didn't have in stock. Then I went to Sound Control and during a quick walk round spotted this thing - it ticked all the boxes: 19" rack mountable (2U, no less :)), 8 ins, 8 outs, big knobs, and an unmistakable charisma. It was at the top end of my budget but it looked like something that would last me a while.

The first very cool thing I've found is that it clips signals at the ANALOG stage, instead of allowing digital peaks - this is awesome - no more recordings rendered unusable if I have a moment of disproportionate loudness!

Annoyingly though, as I don't have internet at home yet, I can't register the plugin software, as this requires a simultaneous internet and UX8 connection, so I'm gonna have to wait a few days to try that.

Other first impressions:
- latency seems a little high (the defaults put it at 43ms - too high for keyboard playing - so I've had to pull down the buffer size significantly resulting in a little more crackling than I'd like)

- when I first turned up the volume high, it crackled a little bit, so perhaps the pots could do with some WD40.

- absolutely NO background noise comes from this to my powered monitors however high I turn the volume :)

- there was a bit of background noise when I was recording with my condenser mic the first time - however I think this was a problem with my mic cable

- the supplied software is a bit of a car-crash, design-wise, but so far it sounds amazing - it's all about distortion ;) (in fact, this might be the step that finally frees me from having to use Reason's Scream 4 for absolutely everything!)

My purchase of this device, along with the new Ableton Live 7 that I downloaded and started trying out last night (time signature changes! at last!! and video export! thanks guys ;) ) considerably raises the bar in terms of what I can produce in a fun way.