The issue with headphones is for simple or temporary use. For instance when I´m on the train for a couple of hours, I mix with headphones, not to disturb other travellers.

The bummer is that I lost the card, DAMMIT!!

I have yet to invest ALL the money to buy a new Micro system. “I make do” with Pro logic. Maybe if it’s possible to attacth the microcard with a powerfull string to the powerbook. Is that possible in any way?. The Kensington lock is a little bit to much?

Now, I can go out of town for the weekend and just slip the micro into my backback without needing have the mBox take up half of my bag.

I can also go to school during the week, and if a client needs a tweak something during the day, I can bust it out between classes. My micro is ALWAYS in my bag.

The ilok dongle sucks though… but it only needs to be in when loading up ProTools, then I slip it back into the bag.

It also works well on the road. So far, so good. It comes with a little short USB extension cable BTW, to keep it from breaking-off if bumped.

As many reporters are using Flash recorders with no need for preamps, this product fills a niche there too.

I think a fair middleground would be for Digidesign to write a coreaudio or ASIO driver that would be compatible with the majority of our soundcards and make it a $10.00 add on (just like the MP3 option). This way everyone wins. I mean do we really need DAE when we’re doing something through headphones anyway?

I don’t think Digidesign is saying “do your final mixing and mastering” on headphones. In fact, the likelihood with many, many engineers is any album you can name was at least monitored on headphones — routinely you’d do just that to double-check your mix, partly just because it gives you a different perspective, and partly because people are likely to listen to your work on headphones at some point.

But I don’t think that’s the idea; here I think composing, arranging, on-the-fly mixing, stuff you’d need to do on-the-road … it’s that hotel room situation, plane delay/layover thing, where you want to get *something* done because the alternative is doing *nothing*. And yeah, you’ll definitely want to go back to real studio monitors at some point. Digidesign clearly was getting feedback that people wanted that, and we see it even here.

If you’re composing or arranging, fine. For compatibility, fine. But 279 dollars?!!! C”MON!! ” ”

-> Craven
It obviously depends on what sort of music you are making, and in what context, but it seems to me that in a lot of cases the mutually exclusive division between composing / arranging / mixing doesn’t really exist anymore … if you are a rock band its probably clear when you are writing a tune, when you are arranging that tune, when you are tracking and when you are mixing, and frankly this Micro MBox thing probably isn’t very appropriate to much any of that process, but for a lot of electronic music of all genres, it seems to me that the process from starting a piece to completing it is often much more like a continuous flow. Some or all of this process can be, and often is, accomplished on headphones … and something like this is fine for that.
I often set up final mixes on headphones if i’m out of the studio, and though personally I would always finish them off using preferably a couple of pairs of speakers AND headphones, often this “finishing them off” is just a matter of tweaking a couple of levels, so one could say that the majority of the mixing process sometimes gets done on phones too … as for $279 … as I have alreday said, $99, at least for existing PT users, would seem fairer, but if this thing is useful to someone making music profesionally then “even” at $279, frankly its a no brainer …