Do you really expect much else from M-Audio? While I like their hardware, I can't say I think much of anything else about them. Especially when it comes to drivers. There are flaws they are aware of that they can't be arsed to fix and they have made that quite clear, and their customer services is downright rude. Fuck 'em.
Little story about M-Audio. When I got my Delta 44, I had a SATA setup in my PC. I installed my new card, and it worked perfectly. The next day, all sound was mired in static and anomolies. even playing an MP3 was fucked up. It actually sounded like a warped record. After a while of trying all manner of things - from rebuilding Windows 3 times, to manually assigning IRQ's (which involved reinstalling windows in itself in order to be able to do that - I called M-Audio's customer services. OK, I'll admit they were my first port of call, but the time I spend on hold led me to try and find my own answer.
So I get on the phone to customer services. A Glaswegian guy answers. Quite relieving to me, because I was expecting to get through to someone in the Middle East or Nigeria. And no offense to them, they are just doing a job, but I can't fucking understand what they are saying. Anyway, I explain the problem to the guy. He asks me if I've looked at my buffer settings. Obviously yes I had, that was the first thing I did. Went through the usual troubleshooting. Yes it's plugged in propery. It was working properly at one point. I asked if I could send it to them to have a look at. He said no. And that if it wasn't working it wasn't anything to do with a with the card being faulty. His reason for this was rather fucked up. He pretty much explained that their hardware doesn't develop faults and that it was 100% that if there was something wrong, it was either me or my computer. That annoyed me.
So then he asks me to go through my system specs. I do. As soon as I mention that I'm running SATA, he explains that "that's it. It's your SATA/RAID". He explained that he had heard of problems with M-Audio running on SATA/RAID. I told him I beleived it to be incredibly likely as it was working fine yesterday. He said it was irrelevant and that it was definietly my RAID. So I said "so you telling me that the Delta 44 does not fully support SATA/RAID". He said "pretty much". I said "well to be honest, firstly, I don't see that written on the box anywhere, and secondly, is this not something M-Audio should perhap look into. SATA/RAID is somewhat of an advancement over IDE, and for audio, people are going to want to use it."
His response was "Listen mate. M-Audio make the best fucking drivers in the world and the best fucking audio hardware in the world. If you computer is running a shitty RAID setup that won't work with our hardware or drivers, then that's not our fucking fault. Now I suggest you take yourself to a computer shop, buy an IDE hard drive and see for your fucking self, because I guarantee you that it's because you fucked up when you put your computer together."
I ignored all the profanity for a second and said "and if it's still screwed up with IDE?"
He said "well I guarantee you we won't be replacing or fixing your audio card for you, because your audio card isn't faulty".
I said "well in that case, fuck you very much for your time. Now may I suggest to you that if you are incapable of doing your job with out firing a barrage of profanity at the customer, you get a job as a fucking sewer attendant, where the rats, and the shit that I am sure you are already so used to wallowing in couldn't give a flying fuck how many cuss words you throw at them. In fact, (at this point I started shouting) I would start looking now, because by the time I have finshed with your complaints department, you are going on the fucking breadline."
OK maybe I was little over the top at him. But it boiled my fucking blood.
And that is the story of how I have lost all respect for M-Audio.
I went from a single unit, to three... multiple units worked ok for a while, but started kicking off.