mLan. mLan, mLan, mLan, mLan....

  • Thread starter Thread starter wheelema
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wheelema

wheelema

Boner-obo
In another post therage! suggested that the Yamaha i88X was a solid sound card for the money. Since I had never heard of the i88X, and I needed a soundcard, I looked into it.

There is a lot that I like about the unit, specially the reputation of the pres, but I am somewhat leery about the mLan aspect. I understand that mLan is a superset of the IEEE 1394 'firewire' protocol, and that the i88X will plug into my firewire port, but I am not too sure about the future of mLan. I kind of get the impression that it is something of a dead horse. The latest Yamaha offering are Firewire, not mLan.

If anyone has any experience with mLan I would sure appreciate your feedback. Am I asking for trouble? This unit is in competion with a Delta 1010 using a DMP3 preamp... a combo that is a whole lot more money than a i88X.

I appreciate that this unit is being discontinued, but obviously that is not a deal breaker to me.
 
I think it's a dog. I'd think the smart thing to do would be to simply stay away from it.

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Some guys really liked that unit, especially for it's supposed great sounding preamps. Myself at one point was considering too until I found out that it couldn't be ran stand-alone. Plus there has quite a bit of problems & questionability about it's format.
 
Myself at one point was considering too until I found out that it couldn't be ran stand-alone. Plus there has quite a bit of problems & questionability about it's format
Click to expand...

it runs fine as a stand alone. Whoever told you that has never used one
 
wheelema said:
There is a lot that I like about the unit, specially the reputation of the pres, but I am somewhat leery about the mLan aspect. I understand that mLan is a superset of the IEEE 1394 'firewire' protocol, and that the i88X will plug into my firewire port, but I am not too sure about the future of mLan. I kind of get the impression that it is something of a dead horse. The latest Yamaha offering are Firewire, not mLan.
Click to expand...

I'm of the opinion mLan should die a horrible death (FireWire AVC all the way for me), as it adds unnecessary complexity to the protocol for features that no devices I'm aware of actually take advantage of in any meaningful way.... :D

That said, as long as you are using current mLan hardware (not something with the old 1.x firmware), you're probably ok. I haven't heard any really significant number of people screaming "these drivers suck" or anything, so I'd imagine they're sensible. The biggest problem with mLan is old devices that still have the 1.x firmware, since the 2.x firmware updaters for many of them can no longer be downloaded anywhere, and the current drivers for most OSes won't work with the 1.x firmware devices. :confused:

BTW, given the history of that, watch for firmware updates on a regular basis.... :D
 
I bought an i88x. I had trouble getting it to work on my system with n-track. Plus, all the speculation that mLAN was sort of dead in the water made me decide to trade it back in on a Mackie Onyx 1220.

The i88x seemed like a nice unit for the price, if you can get them to work they seem like a great bargain. I say buy it from a reatailer that offers a 30 day unconditional return policy, and if you like it and you can ACTUALLY GET IT TO WORK, then keep it.

Plus, there's always the chance that somebody like CEntrance will write a better driver for it.
 
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