Audio-Cable Reviews

I compared this cable with a $.... one from ..... NO difference. I use Sony Elite components and a Velodyne sub with Boston 5.1 digital.

Monster Cable takes fancy packaging and pushes it off as better.

I give them 3 stars because the quality control is excellent - the ends were laser precise manufacturing and the rubber was very high quality.

It's the price that bothers me.

After days of trying to record some old vinyl onto my computer I gave up and called the Griffen. I explained to them that no matter what I tried, the audio signal was getting seriously clipped. They informed me that they are having problems with all of these units and that they are working on a fix...no idea when that fix will be released.

They also informed me that they could not provide a cash refund because it was purchased through a third party.

hope this helps

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After going through 2 of these, Griffin customer support finally told me that "There is a known bug in the Apple USB audio driver that is most likely responsible for the effect you describe. According to Apple the driver sends an "empty packet". This results in a flanging, phasing, and ring modulation." What this means is that about 25% of the time that you send an audio signal to the PowerWave, the output is completely distorted. If you restart the audio, it usually corrects itself, only to become distorted again. This isn't a huge problem if you're just playing music in iTunes, but if you're using the PowerWave as an amplifier while you're working in Final Cut Pro or any other application that involves stopping and starting audio, it is completely useless.

They are working on a firmware upgrade, but as of 9/18/03, this product is unusable with Mac OS X. It baffles me that the company continues to sell these without any kind of disclaimer, especially since Griffin is a Mac-centric company. I hope this review saves a couple of Mac folks from a big headache.

The sad thing is that this will be a really cool product once they fix it. And while they're at it, they should put an on/off switch on the thing, because it has a huge blue light on it, and gets a little hot if it's on all day and night (not to mention wasting electricity).

I've had this unit for over a year now. I use it primarily to power the Apple Pro Speakers because my main desktop is my Powerbook laptop. I also have a Tascam USB controller that is interfaced with it so I can do some digital recording (audio and MIDI). Finally, I hooked up a nice powered subwoofer to the RCA outs which gives me MASSIVE bass and sound rivaling my stereo system downstairs (not quite, but still better than any wimpy sub/sat setup made for computers). Figuring out how to put all of these wires in the right places took some trial and error (and required purchasing the griffin audio USB hub), but I got it figured out in a day or so and haven't touched the wires since. The possibilities with this unit are fantastic. Last summer I got some incompatibility with OSX mentioned in one of the other reviews with the funky distortion, but it hasn't happened since last summer. I don't know why...perhaps the update to jag? Anyways, IT IS GONE. Complaints are similar to the others...BIG BLUE LIGHT is very BRIGHT and annoying. Also, the case does seem fllimsy and not very MAC-like (i.e., not very stylish). Oh, and I did call Griffin to get some help with hookup and they were VERY friendly and helpful. I am quite pleased with this thing.

This software says it's supports Windows XP but it does not. Voyetra does not have good customer service. This is what Voyetra had to say about this package:

"The USB Music Studio Kit is compatible with Windows XP. The drivers just aren't XP certified, but that doesn't mean they don't work.

They do work of course, otherwise how could we sell it?"

If you are on XP it will give you a warning that it is not XP certified and it may damage your system.

If you have $50 to gamble on this package then go for it.

I have finally connected my Yamaha PSR-225GM keyboard to my Toshiba XP laptop and now I am recording music directly from the keyboard into MIDI format. The software takes a while to get used to and there are some places where it might have been more user-friendly, but it is powerful and easy to use once you understand it. I like how you can select and move notes, change the length of the notes, change the musical instrument, and print out music. The music recording captured dynamics.

Getting things to work took a lot of time. I spent a few hours and was about to give up. I am still not sure which of the things I tried made the recording to work. I ended up using the Edirol UM-1SX (purchased separately) instead of the USB MIDI cable that came with the studio kit. I configured the keyboard MIDI settings to channel 1 and made sure the MIDI would be sent out. I uninstalled and reinstalled the application. Then tried recording and voila it worked! Used EDIROL as MIDI input and Microsoft MIDI Mapper as MIDI output.

I bought it because I neded USB to MIDI adapter cable to use my older Windows 2000 laptop with my MIDI keyboard. MIDI worked as soon as I installed the software from CD. The only thing I do not like is the registration with included Voyetra Record Producer software, it forces registration throught Internet to be able to use the software or it goes in 30 days demo mode.

m-audio does not have forums on their site.

there is a reason. their drivers are unreliable and highly incompatible.

absolutely refuse to provide any documentation nor do they accept returns.

if you value the stability of your computer, stay clear. stay well clear

This is an excellent audio interface for the money if you already have a firewire card. However, on my Mac it would not operate on the same bus as other firewire devices. To run firewire hard drives or DVD burners while using the Firewire 410, it may be necessary to purchase a separate firewire card, or perhaps a faster Firewire 800 card would allow all devices to operate on the same bus.

That said, the Firwire 410 is a stable and speedy alternative to slow USB and outdated PCI devices. The eight analog outs allow for multitrack monitoring and surround sound editing, while the two analog ins provide the opportunity for high quality recording. (Although there are four analog in jacks, you can only use two of them at any one time.)

The digital coax and optical outs will drive 5.1 surround and beyond while watching DVDs, and the ins allow for pure digital input. Throw in a midi in and out, as well as two headphone jacks with separate level controls, and you've got a versatile and portable interface for a fraction of the cost of higher end firewire devices from Motu and Digidesign.

Amazingly, it can also be used without a computer for live recording. My only pet peeve is the very bright blue power indicator which flashes on and off when it is turned on without a firewire cable connected, or when the firewire connection is lost. For mobile recording in a club setting, a bright flashing blue light is not desirable. Some concertgoers may have flashbacks to blue light specials of their youth or think the cops are coming. Seriously, if it bothers you, you can always stick a piece of electrical tape over it. I've had mine a couple of weeks, and have only used it with the computer, but I highly recommend it.

Do not be deceived by Monster Cable's fancy looking cables and exotic looking packaging.Inside this thick "Garden Hose" cable,is nothing more than the basic copper wire you will find in a 1/8 mini-stereo cable that costs $1.99.Unfortunately,I did buy this cable,used it,but could not return it.This cable is almost as heavy as my speakers!! I now use a basic $1.99 mini cable from my sound card to my speakers and it works great!!

If you plan on using this cable for a pair of small computer speakers then I'm not sure you will get much out it. On the other hand if you plan on using it for line-in recordings, or to hook up your MP3 player to an aux. input in your car, then this cable is clearly a few steps above and beyond a dinky $1.99 cable.

I recently bought the Adaptec videoh media center and right from the start I had problems. When trying to install the drivers I would get an error saying that this hard-ware cannot be installed. I called the tech support. They sent me an email on how to install the drivers which didn't work, so I called tech support again. They had never heard of this problem, but told me that the problem was with my computer. So I reformatted my hard-drive. When I tried installed the drivers the computer would freeze up and my mouse would not work. I called tech support one last time. Their response was something is wrong with my computer and they could not help me. I tried this on another pc and I ran into the same problems. I sent this back to Amazon with a note explaining all the problems I was having asking for a full refund.
Don't buy this product! I am a computer tech at a university and this was the first time I had any problems like this or ever heard someone say sorry we can't help you.
If I could I would give this product no stars, but I can't

I recently bought the Adaptec videoh media center and right from the start I had problems. When trying to install the drivers I would get an error saying that this hard-ware cannot be installed. I called the tech support. They sent me an email on how to install the drivers which didn't work, so I called tech support again. They had never heard of this problem, but told me that the problem was with my computer. So I reformatted my hard-drive. When I tried installed the drivers the computer would freeze up and my mouse would not work. I called tech support one last time. Their response was something is wrong with my computer and they could not help me. I tried this on another pc and I ran into the same problems. I sent this back to Amazon with a note explaining all the problems I was having asking for a full refund.
Don't buy this product! I am a computer tech at a university and this was the first time I had any problems like this or ever heard someone say sorry we can't help you.
If I could I would give this product no stars, but I can't

I've had this product for about 2 months now. I use it solely for watching television on my laptop, so I haven't explored the bundled video-editing software, and can't comment on that.

My impression is similar to that described in some of the other reviews on Amazon, but I can sum it up by saying that the device itself is functional and works as I expected. It's the bundled software that stinks, and it's just as bad as one of the other reviewers suggested. Intervideo WINDVR 3.0 comes with the Adaptec Videoh, and it's what you use for viewing, and recording, live television. It often has a tendency to hang for no apparent reason, and then when you try to use the "Windows Task Manager" to shut it down, it doesn't work.. 5 minutes later, the computer goes to the dreaded blue screen, completely out of the blue (so to speak). And I'm running this on a new laptop (1300 Ghz Centrino, 256, 80 gig, etc.). The Windvr software crashes the whole system almost on a daily basis.

You can't trust the scheduling software, and one of the most serious design defects I've encountered is the fact that Windvr will stop recording when it reaches the 4 gigabytes limit for the individual file it's recording - in other words, slightly more than an hour's worth of recorded material. Imagine that you've paused a live broadcast of a movie you've been wanting to see.. after about half-an-hour of recording, you come back to press play. Everything is fine for another half-hour, when you notice that Windvr is no longer recording the live feed.. the "delay time" (indicating how much recorded material you have left to watch) keeps getting smaller, when it should remain the same. You reach the end of the recorded portion of the movie and the screen pauses.. you have to hit "stop" - so that you're now viewing the live feed - and by now the movie has gone off the air and they're broadcasting something else.
I've missed more movie endings, and more exciting finishes to sports events in this way, you'd think they would have released an update for this obvious flaw.

Think again. A quick survey of the Intervideo website reveals that they have *never* issued any sort of update to this software, and evidently don't intend to - there is truly no support. Why Adaptec chose this particular software to bundle with their product, I'll never know.

I am told that other software is compatible with the Adaptec Videoh, including the "Personal Video Station" software (which for some reason wouldn't install on my machine). At any rate, the added software will probably set you back an additional $100 or so - but it sounds like it does have the advantage of being more functional, at least.

I bought this cable to connect my laptop's s-video port to my TV. I was a bit confused about the whole "two coaxials" thing (my TV only has one RCA video port), but I figured they were just redundant. When I got the cable, I tried each RCA connector with my TV. One gave a black and white rendition of my computer screen, and the other gave me junk.

As it turns out, this cable does not do any signal conversion, per se. All it does is take the two signals on the S-video cable (luminance (Y) and chrominance (C)) and puts these two signals onto 2 separate cables with RCA connectors. It DOES NOT convert the s-video signal to a composite signal, i.e., what you need to plug into the "video" port on your TV. This makes the cable WORTHLESS- no TV (at least to my knowledge) accepts the separate Y and C signals alone with RCA connectors. ...

To make a long story short- this cable will not work to connect your laptop or other s-video out device to most TVs. Don't make the same mistake I did.

This cable has a male s-video connector on one end and TWO (count em, 2!) RCA connectors on the other. This cable is not sufficient to convert an S-video signal into composite. So if you are looking for a way to plug your S-video only DVD player into your TV that lacks an svideo port but has a set of free RCA's, this WONT do the trick. The 2 rca's seperate the video signal into black and white and one that is blank. Im guessing it splits the signal's chromanance and luminance between the two rca's... but whatever - it's not gonna do the job I wanted it to do so if you're looking for an s-video to rca adapter look elswhere.

I cannot speak for PC users, but this product was absolutely worthless on my Mac. Although my computer met all system requirements and I followed the directions, the adapter simply did not work at all. The software included is amateurish and buggy, no user manual was included (despite advertisements to the contrary), and the read-me files contained on the CD were unhelpful and written in broken English. I contacted QVS tech support for assistance, and they attempted to solve my Mac problem based on their (limited) knowledge of the Windows version, because they didn't have access to a Mac. It seemed that anyone with a basic working knowledge of computers would have been better suited to provide tech support. In short, stay far, far away!

Works fine with Win 2000, video capture quality satisfactory, but captured audio doen't have low frequencies.

Avoid this ADS Instant DVD (?) at all cost. Have tried on two computers, and the USB2 cannot be detected on either. Sorry I bought it.

I can't really add too much to what's already been said. The product doesn't work, tech support is non-existent. I bought it online, received it on a Friday, returned it the following Tuesday after reading about the tech support problems everyone else has been having. When I was installing it, as I plugged in the USB connection, I got the Blue Screen of Death and my computer crashed. When it rebooted, Windows told me the hardware was not designed for XP and that I should not install it. Hmmm, why then does the box for Instant DVD have the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on it? I went ahead with installing the updated software and drivers anyways. When I tried to preview captured video, I got nothing. A black screen. Could not get it to work or do anything. Tried capturing even without seeing anything in the preview in 2 different programs. After 20 seconds it stopped and told me the file was corrupted. And despite the fact that the unit was doing nothing, every time I had the device plugged in, my computer slowed down, my mouse wouldn't respond, and the programs would crash. So I had even less success with this product than the other reviewers here. I have a month-old computer with all the latest gadgets and gizmos. If this doesn't work with my computer, whose computer does it work with?

Having read the positive review here and hundreds others on another website, I will be trying out the Canopus ADVC-100 (do a search for "Canopus" only if looking on Amazon). If after reading this, you are still considering buying this product, do yourself a favor and shoot yourself in the foot instead. It will more fun and less painful.

I bought the ADS Tech Instant DVD +DV after reading some great professional reviews in some of the online magazines. I was really excited to get this product. I now wish I'd paid more attention to the actual user reviews, as near as I can tell the people writing the magazine reviews must have never actually tried to use this product. Put simply... it doesn't work. Believe the user reviews, this is a bad product.

I wanted to transfer some old VHS videotapes to DVD, and I also got the +DV option thinking that it would be a nice way to add Firewire capabilities to my USB 2.0 based system for use with my new Digital camcorder. The Instant DVD box failed miserably to deliver on either of these goals.

Using the DV input with my digital camera I had strange artifacts start to appear on the screen. There were weird blotchy sections that started out small, but then grew as the capture progressed until half the screen was covered. While transferring my old analog VHS tapes, certain sections of the tapes would cause the box to completely lock up. When I could get a capture that didn't freeze, I couldn't get a capture where the audio and video would stay in sync. I tried multiple tapes, multiple DVD mastering programs, even multiple computer systems, nothing worked. This was simply making DVD's straight from the captured footage, I wasn't transcoding anything. The only thing that worked for me was taking a nice clean analog signal from my digital camera (since the digital DV capture didn't work.) That was the only thing that stayed in sync, any input that was less than perfect, like 10 or 15 year old VHS tapes, forget about it.

I sent several email queries to the ADS Tech support, after giving up on their telephone support after waiting forever on hold. Other than the automated "Well get right back to you as soon as possible" responses, I've heard nothing else from them. That was six weeks ago... and I'm not holding my breath. If you buy this product, you're definitely on your own.

I've long since returned my box, and chalked it up to a learning experience. Here are a few things to think about, first of all, do you really want a box that converts straight to MPEG2 format? If you want to change *anything*... clip out a few scenes, add a title screen, join several clips together... you have to reencode the file anyway. By uncompressing then recompressing you're sacrificing quality, and not gaining anything from the built in compression. Also, I didn't realize at the time, but you can get a Firewire card with a cable for almost the same price as just a cable... it's cheap, and much better than spending all the extra money for the +DV option.

I now own a Canopus ADVC-100, it's more expensive but worth every penny. More importantly... it actually works! That's much more than I can say about the ADS Tech Instant DVD.

The description on this item is that "This is a basic kit for TVs with an Older Connection" Not true. This is NOT the "Basic" DVD hookup, this is the "DVD Cable Upgrade Kit" for TV's with MULTIPLE input connections. If you have only a coax connector on your TV, this is NOT the kit for you! This kit comes with a 6' gold-plated composite video cable, a pair of 6' gold-plated audio cables, a 6' gold-plated s-video cable, and a set of 6' gold-plated component video cables. It does not include the rf converter required for an older TV.