The AIRA period came and went in a dramatic black and green explosion. One moment a fantasia of new ideas, next a violent purge full of guillotines and dour retreat.
Revolution produces monsters which have a special beauty. I feel unjust in reviewing these artefacts outside of their historical context – but it’s important to examine both imagination (in the time) and reason (in retrospect).
When I bought the AIRA MX1 Performance Mixer I learned that it could mix USB audio straight out of Roland equipment – very handy. If you want to increase the number of analogue channels you could at one time attach small AIRA effects that accept audio signals, add a whole bunch of programmable effects and output to USB. That sounds pretty sweet but (a) as with the MX-1 they’ve been discontinued really fast and (b) are now bloody expensive – if you can find one. (An aside – you can still use newer AIRA boxes such as this.)
They were housed as eurorack modules and released alongside the System 1m and System 500 analogue modules. Despite the form factor they’re promoted as usable ‘pedals’ so I felt reasonably safe to trial a ‘hardly used’ Bitrazer. (But I’ve started to respect that ‘hardly used’ sign. It means trouble). A Scooper or Demora would be much more fun but you take what you can eBay.
Immediate problem – the module has eurorack sized sockets which need adapters for any usual studio cabling. Next problem – when I managed to get a sound into the box the USB output signal level to mixer was completely useless and no obvious way to raise it. Continuing problem – to reprogram the insides of the box needs the USB cable to go into the computer, not the mixer. Or you could program it with your phone if it has a physical headphone out (which they now don’t) and the software is still available on the app store (it isn’t). Unsolved problem – nothing I do seems to change anything in the module. The PC laptop software reports that the box has been changed but no changes are audible. Conceptual problem – to get digital sound out of the box you need it to be your sound device, which using ASIO means the DAW sends the output back to the box.
All in all – if you’re using it in a rack, it makes perfect sense. But for many other users it doesn’t really make sense as an A to D multi effect unit, especially when things like Cardinal exist. Which is probably why they flew briefly off small shelves.