Matrox MXO series - warning before buying

R

Realdvxuser

Well-known member
Hi all

Ok, I am not in this business to complain about gear or company's. But in this case I do feel a bit of a warning might be in place for future potential buyers. Because this is not described in any 'wow!' review or on their website. It is up to anyone to do with this information. Here's the thing:

We've bought ourselves an MXO2 to use with FCP on mac pro and macbook pro. It seemed an ideal product as we could also attach 5.1 monitors on it. As far as visually concerned, it looks great and I am more than happy. But the problem is with the audio. There are loads of problems with this. Cracking, way out of sync on hitting the spacebar, things like that. Thinking about listening to I tunes while typing an e-mail? Well forget because it's starts cracking like hell. Show a quicktime movie to a client while Final Cut is open? Cracking audio. So you need to switch to seperate speakers for that.

Matrox knows about these problems for a long long time and we have been kept silent with promises for half a year now. And their recent 'fix' still only solves a few of these insane audio problems. I think this is not ok for a product that isn't really cheap, full of promises on the website and simply not working as advertised. I am not the only one having these problems. Matrox' forum is full of agony about this, but you can only log in after a purchase of their products. I now see why. Smart. The thing that bothers me most is that the problems are so obvious and so common, there is NO WAY they may have overlooked this while testing. So if they did a test, they approved of a flakey product and just got it out on the market.

Sorry about the rant, and I don't mean to make anyone look bad. If it was only on our system I would not have made this public like I do now. But since it is a common problem that leads to a lot of frustration for many people, I'd like to advise everyone to test MXO(2) (mini) on their personal system thoroughly before buying.

Maybe other people have different experiences, but I am not at all impressed with their level of support.
 
You know, I bought one of these to go with Avid MC5. I haven't experienced any of the problems you mentioned. But as I think about it, I am not sure if I cam taking audio from the MX02 or not. I might just be using system audio. I am not sure. I do know that I have recorded audio through the unit with matched video, and that was perfect. Maybe it's just playback that's an issue.

Thanks for your thoughts.
 
I have a MXO2 mini with Max. I don't use surround. I do use a firewire interface to drive my studio monitors. So my setup is somewhat different, but using an external interface, I have zero issues using FCP with anything else audio all at the same time. The MXO2 products are dedicated to video apps, so if you are driving audio when your video app is open, I can see where that could be a problem. Matrox does state that surround monitoring is for HDMI output. How are you getting your sound from the MXO2 to the speakers?

I signed up for their forum before purchasing without problem and got my questions answered.

When I got my MXO2, I called Matrox tech support since their setup manuals did confuse me. I received superior, generous tech support without waiting, and received a "out of the blue" followup a couple of days later to make sure everything was ok.

In any event, I posted a few December 2010 Matrox responses to the audio issues. It seems like there are issues with Apple core audio compatability. At least they are acknowledging the issue and seem to be working on it.

FROM ANDY MEES, POSTED DEC 1:

My guess would be that judging from the number of reports here and elsewhere of bad audio / audio pops / crackling audio and issues especially when using system audio / iTunes audio etc together with NLE audio, it seems there were possibly just too many different bugs at play and too many possible culprits ... seems likely the best way to tackle those would have been to simplify the situation, go back to basic "supported app" audio only and get that working rock solid first, and then add back in the Core Audio when the rest is stable.

We'll have to stay tuned for a reintroduction of Core Audio later. Hopefully soon as obviously the main work (original development) is already done.

FROM WAYNE, POSTED DEC 6:

I would like to confirm that the Core Audio feature that was present in release 2.0 has been "disabled" for release 2.1.

The reason I did that, was to finally address all the audio issues reported on the Mac with the 2.0 driver.

In the 2.0 release notes, it was mentioned that you could not use Core Audio and Final Cut Pro, at the same time, for example, as that would cause potential audio glitches etc..

However, even with all the posts, tech calls etc.. we could not 100% identify from user reports as to what audio issues were actually in FCP or which ones were caused by Core Audio being enabled at the same time as trying to run FCP. Way too many variables.

Core audio will be immediately put back in the 2.2 release which is coming faster than you think. We have also made improvements to Core Audio support in the interim.

We welcome any users who would like to contribute in helping make a better product, to post in this thread specific audio issues you have with release 2.1.

We want to ensure that we have covered all audio issues in the next release. I believe in doing it in this manner we will once and for all eliminate all audio issue.

One thing to keep in mind, there is currently an audio issue in FCP, with 2.1, when pressing play or stop/pause, that has a slight glitch in the audio during start/stop. This issue in not a Matrox issue, it is a FCP issue, and we are trying to work with Apple to address this one.

If you have any other issue, please post it here, with as many steps as possible so we can reproduce this in house and address it for the upcoming 2.2 release

We (I) thank you for your understanding, your patience in regards to this topic and having a hand in making the MXO2 family that much better.
 
Like I said, not everyone will have problems with their gear. Indeed, the core audio is a problem that still needs fixing. This is super annoying, but ok as long as things work properly within FCP, well...fair enough. Sort of. But the first couple of months I could only use Soundtrack Pro for audio. Nothing worked well in FCP, everything cracked and was out of sync. This has been sort of fixed now. But as soon as I open up another video app, things go messy again. I often work with several programs open. Closing down and opening apps every time is pretty annoying. It just doesn't work.

My advice goes out to test before buying to make sure that you don't encounter the same trouble. Be at least critical on this before making a purchase. The problems have been going on for a really long time, with hardly any news or updates. And I am not alone in this judging the many posts on audio trouble.

I have seen those posts you quote and they do somewhat give hope that things are getting close to a fix. But in all fairness, they really should've addressed the problems way earlier. They've kept everyone silent long enough with 'we're working on a fix.'

On two out of three (polite) emails explaining the problems I have not heard anything back.

I honestly will never ever buy from Matrox again and much rather pay a little more next time.
 
Have you tried using an external interface? Not saying it tastes good, but if it would solve your issues, the price might be worth it. The Matrox product delivers a lot of good, but this seems to have them flumoxed.

Grant
 
Hi Grant
Not sure what exactly you mean by an external interface in this respect and how the setup would look like.. Can you elloborate a bit more on your setup? Which product specifically?

Thanks for taking the time on this.
 
Yohenk,

In my case I use a Motu traveler Mk3 firewire interface. This will both record audio and output audio. Think of it like an audio swiss army knife. You can control all functions via software or via hardware knobs and switches. Essentially it takes all audio function out of the cpu and routes it through the Traveler. It is zero latency, has very clean preamps, and the output to studio monitors is very good. The interface will become available in your system prefs when the device is plugged in, turned on, and software driver installed. It's really pretty easy. I liked the idea of the Traveler because it has 4 phantom inputs, multiple monitoring options, MIDI, and can be firewire bus powered, so no external power needed. You can also use a walwart or 12vdc. It makes a nice music recorder with a MacBookPro, though it really needs a mixer in front of it for anything serious. Be warned the MOTU audio software with the Traveler is powerful, but a little difficult. Most any decent interface will do most of the same stuff, think Apogee, Edirol, and many others. I would recommend a firewire interface over a usb model since it offers more control with the right software since it can transmit commands.

In any event, all my audio goes in and out through the Traveller and I have had none of the issues that you have. One thing I haven't done is record video and audio to FCP at the same time, though it should work. Motu has pretty sketchy support, but the product is pretty decent. There is more info about moto and audio interfaces at gearslutz.com. The audio board here at DVXuser has some good guys also.

Grant
 
Fantastic Grant, I'll look into it. Thanks a lot!


ggrantly said:
Yohenk,

In my case I use a Motu traveler Mk3 firewire interface. This will both record audio and output audio. Think of it like an audio swiss army knife. You can control all functions via software or via hardware knobs and switches. Essentially it takes all audio function out of the cpu and routes it through the Traveler. It is zero latency, has very clean preamps, and the output to studio monitors is very good. The interface will become available in your system prefs when the device is plugged in, turned on, and software driver installed. It's really pretty easy. I liked the idea of the Traveler because it has 4 phantom inputs, multiple monitoring options, MIDI, and can be firewire bus powered, so no external power needed. You can also use a walwart or 12vdc. It makes a nice music recorder with a MacBookPro, though it really needs a mixer in front of it for anything serious. Be warned the MOTU audio software with the Traveler is powerful, but a little difficult. Most any decent interface will do most of the same stuff, think Apogee, Edirol, and many others. I would recommend a firewire interface over a usb model since it offers more control with the right software since it can transmit commands.

In any event, all my audio goes in and out through the Traveller and I have had none of the issues that you have. One thing I haven't done is record video and audio to FCP at the same time, though it should work. Motu has pretty sketchy support, but the product is pretty decent. There is more info about moto and audio interfaces at gearslutz.com. The audio board here at DVXuser has some good guys also.

Grant
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