Cakewalk V-Studio 100 Hands-on: Mixer + Interface + Control Surface, Mac+PC
“Studio” for many of us means packing musical production tools into a corner of our desk, then being able to fit the whole thing into a backpack and take it with us. It’s bringing along your entire production to a cramped rehearsal room and adjusting tracks in a hotel room. It’s putting together an assortment of unusual pieces of DIY hardware, mobile game systems and an iPod touch, and composing and performing a live PA set. So packing in functionality means a lot.
That makes it worth considering a hardware solution like Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100 in obsessive detail. Combining an interface with mixing, control, recording, and software functions makes the VS especially relevant to the computer musician.
I was one of the first people outside Cakewalk to lay eyes on the V-Studio 100. Part of the initial appeal to me was that it seemed to combine a lot of the tools I wanted into a single package.
Sure, its big brother, the V-Studio 700, is an impressive unit with loads of onboard options. But the V-Studio 100 was more my speed: it has that apartment studio, backpack-friendly attitude. And don’t let the “SONAR” in “SONAR V-Studio 100” fool you, either. While it’s great having a free copy of a special edition of SONAR on Windows you can use the VS hardware and even the plug-in bundle that comes with it on any host on either Windows or Mac. And — oh, yeah – you can also make use of all that audio I/O and mixing to do some crazy stuff with your plugged-in portable game consoles and iPhones and homebrewed electronics.
The real test is whether this one unit can perform the tasks you need. The V-Studio 100 tries to be a number of different things:
- An audio interface (up to 24-bit/96 kHz)
- A mixer
- A control surface
- A wave recorder
- A software bundle
Correction: The street price of the whole package is US$699. (I had incorrectly put the street at $800 instead of $700!)
Anything that does that much will naturally have to make some compromises. Some of those compromises I think are rather well-conceived on the VS, while others I hope will evolve over time.
This will be partially a review, but partially a description of what it’s like using the VS, so if you do have one of these, I can hopefully give you a sense of how to begin using it.
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