REVIEW: Digidesign 003 – First touch (part II)

So on to part 2 of this review. Thanks to my good friends at Jam I had an opportunity to try the 003 console for a couple of days. In the first part of the review things were a bit more theoretical than it will be this time, today I’m going to talk about how it actually performed the few days I tried it.

Crappy behavior…

The first session I use it in, it looses connection, I get an error message and my mouse buttons(!) stop working. Oh jolly… Restarting the computer and reconnecting it helps, besides the LCD gets stuck at “Session loading, please wait” until I press some buttons. First experience – funky, in a really, really bad way. This also happens a few more times when I first work on one session and then decide to open a new one, it simply isn’t loading the new session properly.

But wait, there’s actually more! The first day I use it, it actually loses connection several times. The dialog that appears when this happens says clicking OK will restart the unit and solve the problem. Well, it doesn’t. Restarting Pro Tools and the 003 solves the problem, but that workaround is totally unacceptable. This is not how a good unit should behave. Whenever an error message of this type shows up the lights for the buttons stop working, pushing them again sometimes get it back, but usually not all of them. To completely solve it I have to restart the unit and Pro Tools. My patience is running thin.

I unfortunately only had the opportunity to try the 003 with a slightly inferior computer, namely a MacBook C2D. CPU-wise it never taxes out, but it only has 1GB RAM. I call this inferior because I really think one should have more, even if it’s more than the minimum requirements for Pro Tools. Keep in mind though that it normally works very well if there isn’t a lot of hungry software instruments in the sessions, which there wasn’t when I used the 003. I have even maxed out PTLE track-wise a couple of times in the past without the MacBook starting to behave strange. This leads me to the conclusion that either A) Digidesign have some serious tweaking ahead of them, or B) the minimum requirements set by Digidesign are way to low. I will add that B sounds unlikely though because I have used the same version of Pro Tools the entire time (7.3.1). So with all this in regard, the MacBook shouldn’t be inferior, but it is really the only thing I can say in defense for Digidesign. Some would say it would make for a pretty unconvincing defense though.

Better behavior…

Things do get better, and for a while it’s running like it should. It almost makes me think it needs to be taken for a couple of rides before it really settles and works. Fortunately it is a very nice unit to work with whenever it decides not to test my patience.

The control is excellent with a very nice integration with Pro Tools. No strange behavior here at all, I barely use the mouse at all during the time I have it, and in fact my arms feel a lot better than they have in a long time (I have RSI) during the few days I use it. For details on what it is possible of controlling, check out part 1 of the review. I’ll just say this, jumping between banks is very easy, and finding the desired channels, even in larger sessions with lots of tracks, is easy and quick thanks to the display. The plug-in control is very good as well, even plug-ins that have several “pages” of display controls are fairly quick to control without ever touching the dreaded mouse.

The monitor section is really good. There are two headphone outs in the front, which I find to be a good solution. There are controls for these as well as a monitors knob and a mute button which mutes the monitors (not the phones).

The mic preamps, there are four of them, are definitely useful. They each have gain controls, buttons for mic/DI and HPF. Because of the short time I had with it, it wasn’t possible for me to compare it to the 002s preamps, but I have no complaints about the preamps whatsoever and it seems to me that they have been improved quite a bit.

On the backyard

I have described bad behavior with Pro Tools but great control functions when it works, so how does it work with the other players out there?

With Ableton Live I got it to work, both as a soundcard and a controller, Lives easy midi learn function made it rather painless. I didn’t try every button, knob or fader, but had no problems with those I tried, besides assigning the jog wheel to the crossfade. The respond to Lives mixer from the 003s faders was very bad though. Moving the faders quickly made Lives mixer not respond at all and the 003s fader shoot back to it’s original place again.

With Logic I couldn’t even get the midi learn function to work. What’s more than that, the first three times I tried to open Logic with the 003 turned on it crashed, and that was just when it tried to load the blank startup session! I did get it to work with Logic a couple of times, but it ended up crashing it a lot. Logic and 003 are clearly not good friends.

Conclusion

I really think Digidesign have a lot of work a head of them. While I understand that it’s not Digidesign top priority to make their hardware work with other DAWs than Pro Tools, it should at least be useable. What’s much worse is that it’s unstable in Pro Tools as well. I can’t remember when Pro Tools crashed this much for me, if it ever has. And all these loosing connection-messages? Intolerable. It’s really too bad, because there are some great things about it, improved preamps, the monitor section, but more importantly, the integration with Pro Tools and the plug-ins which is great. I know there are users out there who runs it without problems, but until Digidesign get their shit together and make this unit more stable I can’t really recommend the 003 to anyone. Go back to the drawing table and let me know when it actually works and I’ll give it another go, because this is not “pro”.

Digidesign

A special thanks to Jam Malmö for lending me the 003 and Jam Stockholm for all their help.
Jam