Normally, I hear M-audio, and I think cheap, poor midi implementation and bad quality converters. So, when I went to the SF machine battle a few months back and saw the xponent being demoed, I was very skeptical.
That is, until I saw the dude scratching with it like it was a turntable.
I had been using Native Insturments Tracktor as my DJ software controlled by a Behringer B-control fader. Which was ok. It served the purpose, but it certainly required some getting used to, and was not intuitive at all. My favorite thing about Tractor is that you could cue up an entire set, and it would just play it for you. That, and I did use the built-in streaming features for netcasting.
I felt that it could be risky getting the xponent, especially considering my horrible luck with new audio interfaces, but I decided to go for it anyway.
First I installed it on my macbook pro... The installer errored out for some reason... So I found the drivers and installed them manually, then the torq software installed properly. Everything was configured and ready to go out of the box. Pulled up some mp3, hit play, and I had sound... All good.
My biggest worry was the unpredictable latency that m-audio is notorious for. So I sat there with the crossfader, slamming it back and forth for a good 5 minutes... Solid. undetectable latency. Then cued up another track, and tapped cue on beat. Again, totally solid.
So I started mixing some techno tracks together... .., it does beat analysis, and shows you on screen with little gray lines where the beats land, and the 1 beat is indicated with a thicker gray line. Sometimes it guesses the wrong tempo range, and you have to tell it to double or half time what it guessed.
While it's playing off one deck, loading and previewing in another deck is seamless, there are no gaps or pops when doing file I/O. With the second track loaded, you can hit "sync <" which will take the estimated bpm and lock it to the other track. Also, if you hit start at the wrong time (not exactly on 1), it will offset the start point of the new track to match. Total hax. The only time this does not work properly is when it gets confused with strange percussion that isn't immediately obvious. Though even with jungle it did a much better job than traktor did.
While it is in sync mode, it has some strange behavior. The scrub and pitch wheels are connected, which seems very strange to me, and there is a tendency for little pops as it's moving it around. Apparently, you're not supposed to do this... I switch off sync, and it behaves just like turntables or cdj, whatever. I'm thinking that there's a way to nudge one track to be on, while it's still in sync, and just haven't found that functionality yet.
I installed it on an older 1.2 ghz athlon PC, as a test, and it performed equally well. I actually left it on the PC to free up the macbook for other tasks.
Mixing on it is fun. It feels a bit cheap to the touch, and if you're a spaz with a mixer, it's probably going to snap a fader at some point.
I didn't get into the VST effects yet, or try it as a midi controller, but it can do that too.
Overall, a solid piece of hardware, with a flawless software suite.
