This unit feels lovely and solid, but is very light and portable at the same time which makes it ideal for gigs/club nights. The knobs and connectors are all high quality too, so you needn't worry about them breaking unless you're really heavy handed!

You can plug it into the mains, or it can be firewire bus-powered. It has four 1/4" jack outputs on the back, which makes it ideal for digital DJ'ing setups as well as for recording/music production.

The installer is very minimal. There's no intrusive extra software to deal with, and the unit can be set up in minutes with virtually no fuss.

If portability, build quality, and ease of installation are your priotities, this unit comes highly recommended...if you need more input/output options, you may be better going for the model up.

Setting up

Could have been easier. Definitely not plug and play. On OSX maybe but not on Windows.

What is it like to use?

Many of the controls are accessible from the front panel. The key one for me is the Main Output control. This is a very important feature. The Echo audio Firewire devices for instance do not have this simple but essential feature. Puzzling.

The knobs are quite lengthy and allow for easy tweaking. Nice. The whole unit feels very sturdy, no cheap plastics here.

There are two different Mics I have used with the FA-66 and I have had no issues with either everything has worked well.

Sound
Very clean. No problems on that front. Also the range of drivers (Core Audio, WDM, ASIO) on offer is impressive for this price range.

Competition
The Saffire LE and Konnekt 8 both provide stiff competition.

Pros

There is a lovely flowchart like diagram on the top of the unit which gives a very nice idea as to the inner workings of the FA-66.

This is a very good option for someone who wants a very reliable and good sounding Firewire device but does not have the cash for the FA-101.

Cons.

Edirol missed a very good opportunity here to provide a detailed software user interface like M- audio does with their products. I was very surprised to find a very ordinary software interface with hardly any real options to choose from. Just limited Buffer size settings which are in stark contrast to the various options available with other hardware provider like TC (Konnekt24D) and M-Audio as mentioned earlier. In addition, you must switch the unit off and on when changing ASIO buffer settings.

The power button is placed at the rear of the unit which is not ideal to reach every time.


At this price though I definitely recommend it.

This little box is not pretty, but the build quality is fantastic and it does just what it should. It's extremely well built and sounds great. The combination of balanced and un-balanced inputs means it's very versatile and never leaves my tool box.