I've had the board for over a month now and have had no problems with it at all. I use it a lot with Adobe Audition 1.5 and have not had the first glitch with it with that software.
I did have a few problems with pops and clicks in playback after recording with an old copy of Sonar 2.2 but have solved that by upgrading to Sonar 5 stutio edition.
Just and opinion,,,,, but I think the biggest problem most people have is not reading the manual, or any manual for that matter. We all have a tendency when we get something new to just jerk it out of the box, plug it in and expect to go to work.
Actually,,,,, this board did that for me. It just took me some reading to discover that none of the channel sliders, EQ or FX knobs have anything to do with the what goes out by firewire. The theory in firewire recording is that you want to send as pure a signal as possible to the computer track by track. then Mix and Master afterwards.
The firewire drivers and the signals I get from this piece of equipment are good. You just have to remember that the only thing that has anything to do with what you are sending to the computer is the channel gain control at the Mic or line Preamp level.
The rest of the board is just an average mixer. So if Firewire is all you want........go with a small firewire box because all the rest of the knobs and sliders on the Phonic board will do you no good for that type aplication. It is, however a pretty good little submixer for use as a stage monitor system or something of that nature.
As for Alesis, I tried two of those first and sent them both back because of driver problems which their tech support told me were Microsoft problems with XP SP2.
If you research and do a little google work there are a lot of firewire boxes out there that do nothing but send a firewire signal and do that well......but they're more expensive. I bought
the Helix because it's a good buy for the money, as I can use it for a small monitor mix if I do a playing job out somewhere or use it to send firewire signals to my pc in the studio.
I build custom background music for commercial projects and have been doing so for years using a Fostex D-160 recorder with an Alesis Studio 24 mixer and then transferring my tracks, 8 at a time to computer by ADAT lightpipe in order to work on the tracks seperately with software. That's a lot of extra work that Firewire saves me from doing.
I don't work for Phonic, as Michael S does but I am happy with
the Helix board and it serves my purpose. I will say, that while researching and deciding what to buy I called Phonic Tech Support because I wanted to know if it would work using a 6 pin to 4 pin firewire cable if I decided to do something with my laptop with it. I got a person on the phone who spoke perfect English and didn't have to listen to bad elevator music on hold for an hour waiting to talk to someone, and he answered all my questions. When I tried to get someone at Alesis while I was trying out their Multimix boards, it took over an hour to talk to someone and then he blamed it on Windows XP.
Like I said....Just my opinions. Hope they might help some of you. Firewire will be a great technology, but right now it's a baby that needs to grow so be prepared to grow with it. Computing has come a long way since my first Commadore 64 and the old IBM and Tandy days. I know there are some of you out there like me who are old enough to remember those
Sorry to vent but I do feel better now! 