Topic: Babyface Pro, impressions after a couple of days of usage.
Hello,
Just got myself a BF Pro. Overall - luxurious experience, the hardware, the software, Total Mix FX, DIGICheck - very impressive, everything is customizeable, solved me a lot of issues I was dealing with previously. Here is a list of things I found a bit questionable. I'm posting it not because of 'saltiness' but I would like it to be seeing as a gesture of big appreciation to RME efforts, so maybe you could improve it even further.
1. The the plastic box, the locks. Why they are so tricky to open, was it done on purpose? So, a knife or some sort of tool need to be used every time. Also the size - it is great to have such a box for transportation but it could be much, much smaller and slimmer - making it as small as possible would be more useful.
2. The labeling on the rear (in-out) - it is super obvious what go where and what connectors to use when you already know, but it happen that even not being a noobs in audio equipment, me and my friend made a mistake making a wrong wire with a wrong XLR connectors (judged by pictures, before receiving the unit, following the manual instruction to leave the "cold" wire unconnected).
3. Mouse wheel increments on faders - some times it is 0.3 dB for one step, the other day it is 0.5, and the next one is 03, 04 steps. Would be great to see it at 0.5 or 1 dB by default. Even better would be to have it user defineable in the preferences with acceleration on-off.
4. Rotary encoder on the unit - everything is fine, 0.5 dB increments consistent, but would be great to have the stepsize also user-customizeable with ability to set the acceleration on/off or even to control the amount of it.
5. The driver name. I'm seeing it as a ASIO Fireface USB in the Ableton Live audio setup settings. Not cool.
6. Total Mix FX. Options > Preferences: Level Meters box-area is 1-2 pixels shifted to the right (v1.43, Win)
7. Double clicking on the value boxes in Total Mix FX brings the manual numeric entry boxes - a bit too ugly, Win 95 era style. I can definitely appreciate and enjoy the pro grade 'no fancy' style for the software like what you have with DIGICheck interface, but in this case it is maybe too much.
8. DIGICheck "2 Bar Level Meter" is nearly impossible to move around the workspace (Win 10, default settings at most). There is (almost) no space in the top-bar to drag it around. I was able to find a tiny spot in the most top-left area so I could click-drag it. Or another option is to drag it by sides in several moves.
9. Just some observation. Just very recently I was hearing the nasty loud clicks about once in a minute, like a one-sample error spikes while playing a virtual piano from a controller keyboard. Was solved by replacing the USB cable I was using at that time to the original one (and also unplugging almost all other USB connectors from the rear of the PC).
So here it is, maybe I'll be able to add something more later as I'll use it in a more different situations.
Regards,
Andrei