Customer Reviews

M-AUDIO Transit High Resolution Mobile Audio Upgrade

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Review relevant noly to Macintosh users:

1. Sound output from Transit cuts out frequently, unpredictably, and often irrecoverably. Imagine listening to music and then using the keyboard to adjust the volume and suddenly having the audio disappear. Imagine listening to iTunes and then deciding to switch to a streaming audio program through your browser or through RealPlayer and having no sound in the new application. This happens frequently with the Transit. And about half the time it cannot be corrected by plugging and unplugging the Transit: you have to log out and in or restart. Lovely.

2. Other USB audio I/O devices such as the Griffin iMic simply work without drivers on a Macintosh. The Transit is not visible to the system without its drivers installed, so you're stuck with whatever M-Audio wants to provide. This is probably necessary to provide digital output and some device configuration, but it's a real problem if the drivers are inadequate (as they are).

3. The M-Audio site lists the current driver (1.6.1) as compatible with the current operating system (10.4.2). This isn't true at all. The current driver is dysfunctional with the current operating system.

4. My iMic and my Logitech USB headphones are working fine on my computer, so there's nothing wrong with the hardware.

5. M-audio has yet to respond to my e-mail requesting help, and they don't provide a toll free number for tech support.

Avoid this paperweight and get something that works as advertised. They've had months to come up with a driver that works with the current operating system and have failed. Unfortunately they haven't bothered to be honest about that and are still selling these as Mac compatible (and as compatible with the current Mac OS).

I purchased this item in order to connect my home theater Mac Mini (1.66 core duo, 2gb ram, 160gb hd +500gb firewire, 10.5.3) to my harman kardon receiver via optical cable. Drivers for OSX 10.5.3 are available free on the m-audio site and work flawlessly. The quality when set on 24bit sampling and using the optical cable is amazing, fully taking advantage of my 5.1 Bose cube speaker setup.

Bottom line, don't listen to the old reviews from 4 years ago, OS X compatibility has greatly improved and this item is well worth the money.

It's small, requires no power cord, has no buttons, and has a 104dB s/n ratio and almost no harmonic distortion -- yes! The moment I installed this on my Dell Latitude D600, I could hear a marked improvement in bass clarity and overall imaging.

Now the drawbacks: The software is not so hot. You cannot adjust its output and there is no equalizer. Plus I had a huge driver issue and tech support had no idea how to solve it. I had to do three hours of serious technical detective work (Windows driver version numbers, service packs, system files, etc.) to fix it. (Turn out it was an issue was with XP's USB drivers... surprise!)

Furthermore, it cannot monitor its own line-in. Thus you cannot use the line-in jack to, say, play another audio source through your speakers.

Still, the simplicity of the device and its sound quality won me over. Recommended.

I've tried everything to get this waste of space running. It's being sent back today. It seems that the driver for 10.4.2 is not usable. You can try using the native Mac drivers by following these instructions, but they didn't work for me:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040514125451790

The Transit USB helped me achieve the goal of getting digital pastrhough from my powerbook to reciever. The deivce does a great job of passing DTS and Dolby signals directly through the optical port. The tricky part is setting up the device, the manual is lacking in many areas. Also, rather than use the drivers that ship with the device download the newest one from M-audio. The driver that shipped with mine was over a year old, and did not fully support OS X 10.3.7. Also the manual fails to mention that the Transit USB device creates it own settings icon under OS X, rather than adjust the device through the "sound" or "audio MIDI" control panels, use the "transit" control panel. Overall the sound quality has been great, very crisp, no added static and the digital pass through has worked great. Just don't foget to change the Apple DVD player to "Digital output" from "system sound" to take advantage of the DTS and Dolby signals. Overall a great device to allow digital audio output from a Mac

This is the entry-level for getting a digital audio stream from your Mac to an external DAC.

Unfortunately, it just didn't work for me, due to abolutely terrible drivers. I tried the native driver intall as posted, but I still experienced numerous freezes and crashes on my iBook. I also heard buzzing whenever the hard drive was reading or writing data. Oh, and playing audio seemed to really tax the CPU, to the point where the iBook was practically unuseable for anything else.

I switched to an Airport Express and couldn't be happier. No problems with sound quality, no freezes or crashes, and there's no noticeable load on the CPU.

I bought this unit to replace a first generation Xitel unit. The main problem I am having with the M-Audio box is that if the iBook is restarted, the device driver does not show up. One has to unplug and plug in the USB cable to get it to show up. I should have bought the upgraded Xitel HiFi Pro unit instead (which comes with a full set of cables). This unit does not come with a fiber optic cable, the Xitel unit does, and is about the same price.

Everyone who wants digital audio on his Macintosh is best served with this device. I tried a lot of solutions when I wrote an article about audio devices for DVD playback for Macworld Germany, and Transit is definitely the best of them, specially if someone wants to connect his Mac (PowerBook, iMac, everything with USB ports) with an amplifier that has optical digital input. I use transit now for month and so far had never problems on my Flatpanel iMac.

The hardware may very well be acceptable, but the claimed Windows 7 support for this device is defective. The install disc simply exists saying "your operating system is not supported" but the m-audio has a Windows 7 (64 bit) driver. However after an apparently successful install (after which the device manager claims the unit is connected and working properly) every attempt to send sound to the unit causes the source application to hang. After much trial and error, I found that the unit will work if you go into the control panel, click through numerous dialog boxes and reset the unit to "default" configuration. The M-audio supplied control panel has no effect. After every reboot, the device is inoperable again and the time consuming reset procedure must be repeated.

I don't know if the thing works better with other operating systems, but I'd advise anyone with Windows 7 to avoid this unit.

While the hardware specs on this device seem to serve a wide range of use cases (e.g. music production, audiophile listening on a laptop), the drivers make it rather annoying to use. The audio quality is quite good (when it is working), far better than any onboard audio system I've listened to. On multiple systems (vista 32-bit and windows 7 64-bit), one needs to go into the management utility, switch it into 16-bit mode, then run the audio test before any sound will play. Users need to repeat this process every time the system starts. This issue has been outstanding for quite a long time and support will give no ETA on a fix.