Any experience with Alesis IO 26

My amp arrived! Yay. I plugged it in and by using the gain controls I can eliminate the hiss from the Alesis io 26. It's certainly usable in that kind of setup. Unfortunately, the amp (an Alesis RA150) was faulty so I sent it back. The sound from it was good, but unfortunately their was a mains hum coming, not just from the speakers, but from the casing of the unit itself! If the amp was sat in a back-room somewhere, it wouldn't matter. But it's sat next to me in my mixing room and it's driving me nuts. Actually gives me a bit of a headache. The replacement should be arriving tomorrow, so we'll see if the problem was indeed due to a faulty unit, or if Alesis really just don't care about producing noisy products. Anyone else had this with the RA range of amps?

Yup, looks like Alesis just don't care. This new one still buzzes quit nicely. No matter where you sit it it resonates the surface underneath as well as it's own casing. I think I'd have to suspend it from the ceiling on bungee chord to shut it up, and even then you'd hear it through the speakers! Grrr.

Ok, back to the main topic: IO 26. As BeatPsychic predicted I am having the problem where every time the unit boots up, it's default volume is 100% and the mix is 100% (instant feedback if any of the pre-amps are on). Also the unit will occasionally crash and reset at 100% mid song - ow my ears! Has anyone found a way to make this unit boot at a lower volume level? Whoever wrote the firmware for this thing and thought to himself "Hmm, what would people want the default volume of this device to be" and then decided on 100%, should be fired. From a cannon preferably. ;) Any help appreciated.

What I do is set up my monitoring so that max volume on the io26 is K-20. I never need to go up from there, but even the loudest things you can listen to aren't that bad, at least for the couple of seconds it takes to turn the io26 master down. If I'm mastering K-14, I just turn Reaper's master fader down 6db and turn it back up when I render.

Suppose I could do that, it's just irritating when you have a volume knob sat in front of you that doesn't work properly. Oh well, that's what I get for going Alesis. They're fast overtaking behringer judging by my experience. Out of interest, what's K-20 and K-16? I've never come across those terms before, and a quick search on google wasn't very helpful. Thanks Jamie

Gain problems with i/o26 

Nope, as far as I'm aware, you're stuck. Sorry. I've tried endlessly to see if I can boost it at all. When I found the -6/+10 switch on the HDM program I thought I'd cracked it, until I realised that it was actually controlling the output stage. Doh! The only thing I heard someone do once was use take the preamp:out signal from the insert socket on channel one and plug it into channel two's mic input (ie mic->preamp->preamp->ADC) which gave them more gain, but inevitably more noise. I was actually trying to get an m-audio fast-track ultra 8r when I ended up with this alesis (insert long boring story about m-audio failing to live up to their stock promises here). But my brother has one, he says that while there is more gain than the alesis, there isn't loads. Still I would have preferred it. The lack of gain, the occasional drop-outs, crashes, resets, white noise - pretty crappy for the money really. Alesis support is just a joke too. Oh well, I'm stuck with it now. I've learnt my lesson. Alesis <= behringer thus Don't buy Alesis

I agree, that's where I'd ideally record. However, you can only achieve that with high-output mics like condensers. You would never be able to run a ribbon mic with this at a useful level. I even struggle with some of my condensers for speech (rather than singing)! To be honest, you can get by most of the time, but sometimes you are forced to record below an ideal level and "gain it up" in reaper. It would be nice to have that extra gain before you record... My view has been coloured some what, by every Alesis product I have had being disapointing. The io26 is ok most of the time (gain issues aside), it's just the buggy drivers that annoy me most.

Thanks for the info Analogy. I agree, that would be good practice for the music industry. Perhaps it would stop producers over-compressing every song that left their studio too :)