ESI Maya 22 USB

I bought this box to be able take it with me while travelling, both for good quality listening to audio via my laptop and making basic recordings just with one mic. The Maya works well on both counts. The unit is small and light enough to fit in my laptop case, and seems compact and strong enough to withstand some abuse--the only weak point being the Phantom power button, so best to buy a small camera pouch for it or something. The recording quality is excellent, almost indistinguishable from that of the Echo AudioFire professional soundcard I have in my studio, as is playback via the jack line-outputs. Strangely, the sound quality of the headphone output is noticeably less rich, but still acceptable.

Installation of the software was easy, and at this price and size one needs to take the lack of a hardware volume button in one's stride. I use a PC with W7 and the only drawback is that the software programming does not appear to be well thought-out in that the control panel is impossible to close, even when the Maya is unplugged. The only way to get rid of the control panel is to untick it in msconfig > startup and restart the computer. But when reconnecting the Maya the control panel is not automatically reactivated. A quick search found the .exe file in the Systems 32 folder, from where I made a shortcut to my desktop, to manually reactivate it when necessary.

Beware, this product only works with drivers. I bought this because I read in the product description that it is driverless. I had no success getting it to work on either Windows 7 or OSX Lion without the driver and control panel. I had totally intermittent results getting it to work on OSX Lion, and what's worse is that I bought it as a gift for my GF who does not have the 15 years of experience that I have messing around with computer gear. In theory, a great product... Driver nightmare for me, which is exactly the opposite of what was advertised as a "driverless" product. (the driver takes 10 minutes to install, if it even installs, good luck.) Very disappointed. Bought as a gift for an inexperienced person. Oops.