A Novice’s Review of the M-Audio Transit USB

I use a Yamaha CD recorder with hard drive at home but wanted a digital recording device for portable use with a lap-top. I only need line-level recording capability at present, mostly for recording from satellite radio or vinyl LP via a pre-amp. Having located Dolphin Music on the web and being impressed with their site, I asked them for advice by email. Their response was prompt and to the point. For my purposes, they recommended the M-Audio Transit, which I duly ordered. Dolphin Music’s service was excellent and the Transit arrived safely within a couple of days.

The Transit is astonishingly compact and light and really can be carried in your pocket or handbag. It comes with a bundle of dedicated software, a USB lead and optical digital input adaptor, but you need to supply your own audio connecting leads. Its compact size make it ideal for use on the move.

Loading the drivers, both sets of software and hooking the Transit to the laptop was straightforward. But I am a novice at computer recording and I found the software supplied with the Transit daunting. Although the on-screen guide to the virtual knobs, sliders and buttons is helpful, the instructions for using the Live software are not easy to follow. The difficulty is aggravated by the fact that it is impossible to print out the instructions, so they have to be read on-screen, presumably for the sake of copyright protection. I spent a couple of hours trying to decode the instructions for the accompanying Reason software and gave up. Unless you already understand studio recording equipment and techniques Reason would seem to demand a lot of study and practice. It took me an hour to figure out you could not use it to record anything!

After some tentative experimentation and only one telephone call to M-Audio’s technical support team I managed to make a simple stereo recording from an analogue source using the Transit and the Live software. I got a lot of helpful advice from M-Audio about setting up the lap-top to avoid interference from other hardware and software and found the recommended website "musicxp" very informative. The quality on playback compared very favourably with any DIY digital recording I had heard before, although I did notice some distortion caused by clipping at peak levels.

Further attempts produced similarly impressive results but the Transit and Live combination defied all attempts to eliminate audible clipping. This was also clearly visible in Live’s on-screen waveform display. The clipping problem was not so marked with the Transit drivers set to 16-bit/44kHz but at 24-bit/96kHz it was severe and persistent. Sources with a large dynamic range clipped at every combination of bit and sampling rates offered by the control panel. One of the attractions of the Transit is that it offers 24-bit/96kHz recording capability as well as CD quality 16-bit /44kHz. I was disappointed to discover that I might not be able to benefit from the higher quality the Transit promises. I tried all the recommended tweaks to the laptop but to no avail. I should say that the laptop in question is only a few months old and far exceeds the requirements specified by M-Audio so I was surprised it would not work properly. Input levels can be set on-screen using Live but to no avail. Whatever amount of attenuation was applied to the line-in signal the clipping remained. None of the supplied instructions addresses the issue or offers a clue as to the possible remedy.

After much reflection it dawned on me that the problem had nothing to do with the lap-top or the software. The controls I had been using were all virtual not real. In other words, nothing I was doing to attenuate the digital “line-in” signal on-screen was having any effect on the actual analogue signal entering the Transit. I remembered that with analogue recordings using different line-level sources it was usually necessary to reset the gain controls on the recorder to compensate for the very variable output signal strengths associated with different equipment. There seems to be no universal standard for “line-level”. So I disconnected the Transit from the line-out connection on my pre-amp and hooked it up to the headphone socket. Low and behold by use of the pre-amp’s volume control I was able to eliminate clipping entirely, for all bit and sampling rates.

Now I feel a bit silly, first for not realising that this would be necessary and then for not asking Dolphin Music the right questions in the first place. It is obvious now that nothing that happens in the lap-top is going to have any bearing on the analogue signals going into the Transit. Looking at other external sound cards on Dolphin Music’s website I see that most of them have some sort of gain control, albeit at a higher price point. I am also a bit miffed because I had to discover this the hard way. M-Audio do not explain this in their sales literature or specifications and the minimal instructions issued with the Transit offer no help or guidance about actually making a recording. When I ordered the Transit I had assumed that it must have some sort of in-built recording peak signal limiter like most Nicam VCRs and some cassette and voice recorders I have used in the past. I was sceptical about the impact this might have on ultimate sound quality but as there was no mention of the need to attenuate line-level signals I assumed the device must be self-regulating. I wish now that I had asked explicitely how the analogue signal was controlled before I ordered the Transit.

I have no idea whether this is a problem common to all sound cards without separate gain controls. One might suppose that it would be true of most internal PCI cards so it is disappointing that so little guidance appears to exist for the uninitiated.

To sum up then: the Transit is capable of making excellent digital recordings, provided that you can master the relevant software and provided that you realise you will need independent control of the analogue signal the device is receiving at so called line-level. Once you have factored in the cost of attenuating the line-level signal in a way that does not degrade its quality – the headphone outlet on most pre-amps not being ideal – you would probably be better off spending a bit more on a purpose built sound card/interface with integral gain control.

As a newcomer to the world of computer audio recording I am sufficiently impressed with the Transit’s essential quality that I am already thinking of making the necessary upgrade myself.

I purchased the Transit to alow me to record and play back hi-fi audio between my stereo system and my laptop. The interface I needed was SP/DIF optical or coax on the stereo side and USB on the PC side. That is exactly what the transit does. I have no need for a/d or d/a conversion because the SP/DIF feeds a Meridian 562, which has a pretty good ADC (at 44.1k 16bit) for analogue sources (tape, vinyl, FM radio) and the speakers take a digital feed as well (up to 96k 24bit)
Input for recording works fine out of the box, though installing the drivers was a bit hit-and-miss. at about the 4th attempt it all worked.

The M-audio site claims it is possible to use their USB products with a USB hub, though they don't really recommend it. When I tried, it would not work at all. The pc failed to recognise the transit was there and the support people just said "don't use a hub".

I have not been able to get output to work, except very rarely and intermittently, despite trying all the latency and bit rate options.

I'm now back using a Creative Audigy2 pc card, which works first time every time, regardless of bit-rate, latency settings etc. Unfortunately this is not the answer for me because I want to get a sub-notebook (e.g. Acer Aspire 1) to front-end my stereo and they dont have a PC card slot. When I get more time I will see if I can get further help from M-audio support, who are very prompt on answering queries.

To summarise. This is an amazing piece of kit for the size if you want to record. I guess most m-audio customers are most interested in the recording side. However I'm sceptical about the USB interface.

Purchased the M-Audio Transit to replace a Griffin iMic, which had unacceptably poor audio performance. (The iMic came nowhere close to meeting its specs). The only other product i found in the same category and price range was the Edirol UA-1X (not tested by me).

The Transit was purchased for use with a Mac G4 TiBook, primarily for good-quality transfers of stereophonic analog audio into the digital realm, and monitoring of same.

The G4 is currently running Mac OS 9.2.2 and 10.3.4. My friend (the TiBook owner) and i both prefer OS 9 at present, due to greater familiarity with both the OS and our existing audio software (Coaster 1.1.3, Amadeus II 3.7.2, and ProTools 5.0.1 Free, mostly).

Regrettably, both the 1.5.4 and 1.5.1 M-Audio Transit drivers available on the provided CD-ROM and the website are extremely buggy and totally unworkable with normal Sound Manager-compliant audio software. Level meters completely fail to operate (displaying random noise). Even the input level controls are inoperable! That not being enough damage, the mere existence of the Transit driver software prevents other audio hardware (such as the built-in mic of the TiBook) from operating! The only operable aspect of the Transit under OS 9 on this system is the audio output, which usually worked without hurting anyone.

We went round and round with the M-Audio folks regarding this problem. While they attempted to help, the bottom line was that it is unlikely that there will be revised OS 9 drivers, even though the existing ones are not operational in fundamental ways. M-Audio claims that audio software capable of using ASIO drivers, such as BIAS Peak, operates better. We test-drove a demo of Peak LE 3.2, and frankly that $$ payware product itself was so unstable that we were unable to meaningfully test it (unlike our “horrid” [per M-Audio] inexpensive shareware, which *is* stable).

Under Panther 10.3.4, life was better: everything we tried seemed to work. (We used driver software v. 1.5.7f1 and the Transit has firmware v. 1.00). Please note that we must be lucky, since many commentaries on xlr8yourmac.com indicate that there are problems with other OS X configurations that are as serious as what we encountered under OS 9. Proceed With Caution!

The Transit hardware itself is very nice, and, unlike the Griffin iMic, fully meets its specifications. Too bad it is saddled with poor driver software.

In the end, we decided my friend would keep the Transit, and use it only under OSeX with Amadeus II. Not what we wanted, yet workable.