M-AUDIO Transit High Resolution Mobile Audio Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: Transit: Proceed with Caution
Review: Bought an M-Audio Transit to replace a Griffin iMic, whose sound quality was not acceptable, on a Macintosh G4 titanium PowerBook 667 MHz (1 GB RAM, OS 9.2.2 and 10.3.4).

Transit hardware: Excellent. Meets its wonderful specs.
M-Audio Mac OS 9 driver software: Garbaggio. Totally non-functional and not very stable.
M-Audio Mac OS X driver software: Works for us, not for others.

The Mac OS 9 software is unusable junk: neither the input level controls nor level meters of most software will operate with the Transit, though the same software works fine with the (inferior, audio-wise) Griffin iMic, and Apple built-in hardware on other Mac models. Software which will not work with the Transit and its current drivers (we tried both 1.5.4 and 1.5.1) include: Coaster 1.1.3, Amadeus II 3.7.2, Sound Studio 2.0.7, and the OS 9.2.2 Sound control panel. All these are standard Sound Manager-compliant software packages that work stably and well with everything except the Transit. Only the output of the Transit seems to work under OS 9.

During the week of troubleshooting and emailing, M-Audio support recommended using software which supports ASIO drivers, avoiding the Apple Sound Manager. They recommended BIAS Peak LE. We tried the demo of Peak LE 3.2, which was so wildly unstable that we were unable to perform meaningful tests.

We had acceptable results with OSeX Panther 10.3.4, though other OSeX users have not (details on xlr8yourmac.com). Proceed with caution, and make sure you can return the Transit if you cannot make it workable on your system.

Wishing everyone trouble-free audio input and output,

))Sonic(( (and unnamed friend)

Rating:
Summary: Best Solution
Review: Everyone who wants digital audio on his Macintosh is best served with this device. I tried a lot of solutions when I wrote an article about audio devices for DVD playback for Macworld Germany, and Transit is definitely the best of them, specially if someone wants to connect his Mac (PowerBook, iMac, everything with USB ports) with an amplifier that has optical digital input. I use transit now for month and so far had never problems on my Flatpanel iMac.

Rating:
Summary: Driver problems
Review: I bought this unit to replace a first generation Xitel unit. The main problem I am having with the M-Audio box is that if the iBook is restarted, the device driver does not show up. One has to unplug and plug in the USB cable to get it to show up. I should have bought the upgraded Xitel HiFi Pro unit instead (which comes with a full set of cables). This unit does not come with a fiber optic cable, the Xitel unit does, and is about the same price.

Rating:
Summary: Tranist USB small device, big results
Review: The Transit USB helped me achieve the goal of getting digital pastrhough from my powerbook to reciever. The deivce does a great job of passing DTS and Dolby signals directly through the optical port. The tricky part is setting up the device, the manual is lacking in many areas. Also, rather than use the drivers that ship with the device download the newest one from M-audio. The driver that shipped with mine was over a year old, and did not fully support OS X 10.3.7. Also the manual fails to mention that the Transit USB device creates it own settings icon under OS X, rather than adjust the device through the "sound" or "audio MIDI" control panels, use the "transit" control panel. Overall the sound quality has been great, very crisp, no added static and the digital pass through has worked great. Just don't foget to change the Apple DVD player to "Digital output" from "system sound" to take advantage of the DTS and Dolby signals. Overall a great device to allow digital audio output from a Mac