14 DAY TRIAL // Alesis has announced its latest in the field of control surfaces, in the body of the Master Control Studio Interface, a piece of prosumer class audio gear that will help you work better with your audio and do more complex recording and mixing with ease. In fact, the Alesis Master Control Studio Interface is a mixture between a recording interface and a control surface, as it boasts the best of the two worlds available in the Alesis HQ. If you're looking for an intuitive and feature-loaded piece of audio technology for your home studio and are on a rather tight budget, then the Master Control could be one of the elite choices.
The product is a FireWire gadget that will let you record and monitor audio sources with an extremely low latency and accuracy.
As expected, the Alesis Master Control Studio Interface offers 44.1 to 192 kHz recording and sports a huge array of connections that are destined to help you register pretty much any kind of instrument, in the best conditions. You get “two XLR inputs with phantom power and channel inserts, six TRS line inputs, and extensive expansion capability. Twenty six simultaneous inputs are possible with the optional S/PDIF and dual S/MUX ADAT Lightpipe inputs,” as specced in the Alesis release
The same source mentions “Six analog outputs are configurable for use with 5.1 surround, three sets of stereo pairs, or six discrete outputs. MasterControl offers dedicated speaker switching, enabling mix engineers to dynamically select between multiple monitors to check their mixes on different speakers or in different rooms. A stereo headphone output is also provided for an additional mix reference.”
On the functionality side, you get no less than 8 360 assignable knobs, which will let you control a total of 24 individual parameters in any DAW. Moreover, speaking about DAW applications, the Alesis Master Control Studio Interface comes bundled with two of the award-winning audio production applications: Steinberg Cubase LE 4 and Ableton Live Lite 7, for your peace of mind.
The Alesis Master Control Studio Interface will be showcased at the next NAMM in Anaheim, Calif., between January 15 – 18, 2009, at the Alesis booth, number 6400. The MSRP is $1,299, but the street price could go some $300 less.
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