The sound is top notch for a $500.00 interface. The solid state pre's sound great. I don't understand all the bad reviews, those customers obviously do not know what the audio game is all about. I have several solid state outboard pre's that cost thousands of dollars and the profire 610 pre's are definitly in the same ball park. Obviously they aren't warm and colored in the same way as a tube pre, but they are not harsh like the majority of solid state pre's built into interfaces of a lesser grade. And so it has plastic knobs so does my $2,000.00 digi 003 who cares, I didn't buy the interface for the knobs, I bought it for the pre's and the a/d converters.

The 8 line out's are fantastic, it allows me to process through my outboard eq's and comp's and not bog my IMAC down with plug ins. And whoever said the profire doesn't work with IMACS is dead wrong! I have used mine with my IMAC and have never had any problems. I have also used the profire with a dell on win xp/and win 7 and still never had I had any problems with it. Knowing what your doing is half the battle folks!

It was easy to understand and use. Yeah it's probably not easy for the absolute novice just getting started but you learn these things.

The best it can be for it's price, if you want non plastic knobs go spend 2,000.00 on an apogee duet or something that doesn't have plastic knobs.

It's a great value for the money and it's an interface that performs like an interface twice the cost.

never used them as of yet.

it is what it is.

well rounded

any style that walks through the door

I get very accurate sound from this interface on all i've recorded with it. Vocals, guitar, direct line in with various basses, and with a very low noise floor (both by bit rate/depth and hardware) i can pick up very subtle dynamics with vocals, strings, or whatever i plug in, though i will say i usually use this to supplement the electronic music i work on. I run 64 bit audio at 96000khz and up to 70 tracks in a project, about half of those are stereo, so yeah, this card can handle some absurd i/o. current latency is 5.3ms. If anyone is having a hard time getting decent latency with 24bit 44,100 must have a completely crap system otherwise. I have Win7 64bit, AMD Phenomx4 processor and 3gigs of ram. Gonna upgrade system as soon as the amd 6 core bulldozer comes out, but with what this system can handle, it's still hard to justify, but hey, if you can get latency

It came fairly no frills, just a driver CD, Ableton Live Lite 7 (which there are free updates to on Ableton's site) and a cable. That's more than i need, and i still haven't messed with Ableton, as i have Sonar 8.5, which runs flawlessly with this hardware.

. The GUI for the M-Audio Profire Control Panel could be annotated a bit more (Why is this or that option greyed out, ect..) but it is overall very well labeled, easy to navigate, create your own presets (for various recording session types)

I waited until the Windows 7 drivers were released before installing and I am more than happy with this interface, and i have had NO crashes, no bug reports to file. Hardware is rock solid other than the plastic volume control knobs on the front. I replaced those with cool old guitar knobs though, so no worries if you have those or ten bucks to buy them. The reliability for long sessions is great. I would give it a 10 for price to performance ratio alone, but i am taking off two points for the cheapo knobs and the fact that this is NOT full professional quality and i don't want people who need a full studio environment for mixing to think this will give them all the ins/outs they really need.

For $399.99 i have found no better interface period. the sound quality and reliability have made this item an easy recommendation to all my friends who are just getting into music production. bundled software is nice and will undoubtedly make some djs very happy, but it's not tuned to my needs, so i didn't use it.

M-audio's support is kinda slow, but their online knowledge base is so detailed you practically don't need it. I've had no issues with this product, just the Axiom i bought, so i haven't dealt with the interface support guys directly.

Most people with a cheap usb interface drool on mine, but can't seem to convince themselves it's worth it until they use it. Having had it, and working with other interfaces, i would say it is a sexy little beast, as it makes my buddies super excited to get one. Nice black finish, stylish blue leds, solid metal case. Gotta say it has great design.

Active Musician, Recording Engineer, Remixer

Electro a la Prodigy, Pendulum.

Semi-pro

Rock

Great sounding unit. Huge (but natural sounding) stereo image. Pristine playback, great preamps, and 192KHz recording capability. Can't ask for much more in a unit that costs under $400. Definitely rivals some high end interfaces I've owned over the years.

Came with everything I needed to get up and running. Lots of inputs/outputs for the home recording engineer. No compaints here.

Pretty easy to use...just follow directions for installation and you're ready to go. I just had to play with some of the software settings to get everything to my liking, but that is to be expected.

Seems pretty tough, all metal construction. Just be good to it and it will be good to you :)

To be honest, I'm surprised this unit doesn't go for way more. The internal components found in this box are usually found in interfaces costing twice as much. Great value.

Haven't needed it so far.

Its black, its square, its metal...a few cool LEDs. Nothing to write home about, but it blends in well with any studio, so no complaints.

Mastering Engineer

Great feature set for the price, exactly what I wanted.

Easy and intuitive

The device itself is great, but the Windows 7 64-bit driver is a nightmare. I have wasted endless hours on this issue, and the M-Audio forums are overflowing with sob stories (I now realize) Do not purchase for W7/64. (no idea if the 32 bit is ok or not, I think its the same driver though)

Useless because of poor driver support.

Great in theory, but wasted endless hours of my time on bad drivers.

Hobbyist

Rock

Sound is very good. I'm happy with the sound quality.

It comes with two firewire cables. metal black case with a blue LED so it looks cool.

When it works, it works well and it's easy to use. I dont have to pay attention to it.

CRC errors once a week. I have a rock solid high end computer system, WinXP32, flawless performance and 7 years working for a major computer company. This unit gets into an error state often, in which case it seems to work and the computer can still play sound. However try to change the settings for it in your DAW, or try to open the control panel for it in the task bar, or try to play MIDI through it and you'll get Cyclic Redundancy Check errors. A system restart usually resolves it but only until the next time. I have the latest drivers from M-Audio. When you come home from a hard day at work to your musical escape, last thing you want is to be reinstalling drivers or restarting your system (esp. if you work on computer problems all day). If you can afford an $800+ interface, avoid this buggy device by all means.

it has better reviews that MOTU, that's enough for me.

I have not dealt with M-Audio. a CRC error is most likely the combination of my hardware coupled with this device. I dont really feel like playing the game to prove thier device has the bugs, not my system.

Plastic knobs, other than that, looks tough, black metal case, it would be more appealing if it had no bug in it's driver which is what really mattters to musicians. - 10 for reliability, that's for sure.

Active Musician

Electronic

Solid design but very poor Windows Vista and Windows 7 drivers (2.0.5). Practically this product cannot be used with Windows Vista and Windows 7 unless they release compltely new drivers, which I doubt since this is rather inexpensive, non professional product. Problems include cracks, gaps and system crushes - even with buffer size set to max.

ok

ok

I am just going to sell it

This will not work with an imac. even though it says its compatiable with mac software like logic and garageband. um, not so much, i can't even get it plugged in. yea thats right the firewire cables they supply you with will not connect to your imac. they give you a 6 to 6 pin and a 6 to 4 pin. neither one will fit into the firewire on my imac. what crap! i guess i need to find a firewire that will fit correctly or take it back to sam ash where i drove over an hour to get to. if you have an imac make sure to question your sales rep about this. otherwise your gonna be pretty upset when you get home. one would think if their gonna advertise it being compatiable with macs that it would have the correct firewire for your computer. 400 bux and as of now it's useless. thanx m audio.

the pres on this thing sound pristine. they blow away the 410,mbox,and firebox, and line 6 ux2. its amazing that pres this good come in a box this cheap.

the drivers were buggy but its a pretty new product so ill give them some time to update it.

very solid build, although the knobs feel light and plasticish

hands down the best value for this pricepoint, the preamps on the other 400$ interfaces dont touch this.