What's bothering me the most is not sticking to their announced promise and not even participating in this matter.

I have a mac-mini running all the time just for the MIO, connecting to it via VNC which is pain in the a$$.

Personally, If they don't release a Windows version by the end of the year, I will switch to Prism ADA-128. Enough is enough.

We all have to make decisions, often not ideal for what we want. I initially used my first ULN-8 in stand alone mode during remote recording, but couldn’t get it to consistently work in a reliable manner with my windows based setup. I reluctantly switched to a Mac based setup, and now have two ULN-8 and a MacBook Pro for recording and mixing. I’ve been very satisfied for several years now. We can’t know how and why MH makes the decisions it does.

So if they added Windows support, would you switch back?

Yes, there are a TON of implications for adding support for a whole new platform. Unless you've been involved in software dev, it involves more work than people can ever know.

I concur. A shame.

Enough to keep me with RME for the foreseeable . .

MH and RME are some of the few companies with a healthy, *long-term* support and ecosystem philosophy

PC support would open up more customers for sure. But PC support can be a real challenge for some smaller companies/developers. PC world offers so many more variables to compatibility/reliability that it's a different challenge.

No.

Lack of pc support is a non starter for me for metric halo and apogee symphony II.

They need to at least just license a third party asio driver like apogee. They already have the usb port

The test is bs and mostly measures phase shift. Now that metric halo have linear phase filters for the mk iv, it will measure a lot better.

Every converter has at least a 1st order low pass causing slight phase shift. They all have slight phase shift. Proper multi bit delta sigma da upsamples the pcm audio with a linear phase filter, noise shapes the errors and noise far above the audible band well into the mhz, then it can get away with a 1st order filter.

Minimum phase filters or mixed phase filters scramble the phase at 44.1 and 48 kHz. Half band filters at 48 kHz permit slight aliasing in the audible band but it’s still -100 db of band rejection in the audible band and the converters that use them, usually use them at 44.1 kHz too with -90 db of band rejection, inadequate, but most of them sound identical perceptively at 44.1 and 48 kHz! Nobody on earth would say a Prism with a mixed phase filters or a Weiss converter with a half band one at 44.1 kHz is worse than some cut down test board sold on Ali express with a brick wall filter and counterfeit electrical parts. You’d need to be severely misguided or have piss poor monitoring to think so!

Compounding that is how Apple silicon totally pants Intel in terms of both performance and power efficiency (very important for laptop production). Music devs can forget about PCs gaining traction in the music industry for the foreseeable future. Small companies must choose their path wisely.

Well that's for a different thread really. But yeah, how anyone chooses to deal with compatibility issues between processors, motherboards, hardware, bios setups, what have you, is beyond me.

I switched to Rme because I now use Windows. I like Metric Halo's ethos, but I don't think they should have stated an intention to have Windows software in 2018 to build up hopes, when 7 years later there's only standard UAC2 support I think.

Now after exactly 11 years of using,or 'fighting' ,mh rig ,I would switch to motu avb within a second,if I wasn’t too lazy/old selling stuff,buying other gear,doing cabling/patchbays learning its quirks ,over and over again…
I’ll try to explain my experiences with it,and by no means want to bash it,as it has some great features.
I must state that for me personally 3D ‘upgrade' is functionally step backwards,except for unifying multiple boxes(which also has some problems,but I’ll come to that later)

I‘ll start with positive aspects:

Monitor Controller,digitally controlled analog path,after DA

There comes first difference to previous generation(2D),and loss of functions.
No reordering of sources or destinations,if one wants to reorder/change it,all must be deleted and built from scratch.No list of sources,only buttons,that get smaller the more sources one has,to the point that it’s not readable at all.
Lost function of selecting the destination,setting desired gain,and with right click making it calibrated '0' mark.

Inserts for mic pre’s in analog domain,before ad

Sound is still very good,many call it more detailed and transparent.
I personally liked 2D more,and even let my technician swap the cards couple of times.
Still,I can clearly understand why many people like it.The rest is personal preference,meaning I liked slightly darker,smoother,more extended in the lows,sound of 2D.

Future proof.
I was completely into it,now I see it slightly different ,after 7 years of waiting to come out of public beta software version and waiting for the old,really great features to be brought back and implemented again.Which I doubt now will ever happen.
Still,if you bought an interface 25 years ago,it’s still supported for Operating systems that are coming faster then ever(or I’m getting too old)

As I went into MH ecosystem,I started with 3 LIO/ULN units,and admittedly due to the FireWire protocol,it was a mess to get them working as 1 large system.I sold 1 immediately and was trying for months to make them work as 32 I/O (16 analog and 16 digital Ins and outs)
Upon every boot they would be off for some samples,sometimes 1 box would be faster,meaning,had to delay it,and very next day the other way around.Different sample value made it even harder/impossible to chase it.
Memory was insufficient,after making 6-7 stereo busses,there would be no level meters,even though audio was working,but no visual feedback
Still,routing,consistency,precision,
within mio mixer was fenomenal.
One could choose to take signal to host right after preamp/line in,or after all plugins,or right in the middle of plugins chains.Auxes too.
Every single aux,for every channel had polarity invert switch,Which is simply great for a lot of situations.Of course,pre/post fade for every aux individually.Now it’s only global!!!l like cheapest mixing boards,where you can select aux pre or post fade for the whole board,and all channels…simply unbelievable

Plugins sound really good,the only thing is,you can’t use many of them,as the memory is not sufficient ,and their latencies are all over the place.Some of them even in bypass .

Mio mixer now,in 3D and mio mixer in 2D have nothing common except its name.
I was hoping more for the features like show/hide selected channels,especially when you can easily have 40-50+ of them .
To host and from host cannot be named.Without undo,and on the top of that very easy to delete assignments,you can be staring at the list of some 100 to host channels quickly
Whole mixer needs a lot of clicking,all the time dialogs coming up…some cannot be even confirmed with enter key,literary have to move the mouse and click on the tab to confirm it..

And here is my personal biggest issue:
No matter what you do,how you organize your template,routing ..it never acts as 1 whole,large count I/O system.
Meaning,by having 4 units,user still doesn’t have 32 analog I/O,where you can freely send correlated signal to out 3 and out 18,for example,and they simply stay correlated.
The same for the input side.
Nightmare for parallel processing,hardware inserts ,and so on ..
Using so called EdgeCards adds 32 samples in each direction,so if you 'just' route a signal to,let’s say Adat optical pair and back,you gained 64 samples of latency…
Speaking of Adat optical edge card,channels 1-3 have different timing than 5-8…!! If you mult a signal to 8 optical channels,it will arrive at the destination at different times.


My personal opinion is,that it is absolutely exceptional for people working with only 1 unit,recording 1-2 tracks at the time,stay itb,don’t care about hardware inserts,hybrid mixing,…
For large tracking/mixing sessions it is for me absolutely show stopper.
I still work with motu pcie card,using mh units as adda converters.
For that,they are overpriced for me.

Updates are so slow,it feels like they are non existent.Bringing new modeled plugins,that you can use just couple of instances before your dsp is maxed out, instead of fixing serious problems, is actually telling me everything I need to know.
Like,waiting for people to forget how good it was..

Coming back to :
If I would not be too lazy/old,I would go once again into stress mode,changing my core system.

I have to mention that I work with Digital performer,which always played nice with its house mates
And that would be Motu avb.

With all different informations and experiences with different rigs I gathered through the last years in searching for large,flexible,reliable rig,btw. have never spent more time on troubleshooting gear than with mh stuff,
RME pcie as interface,with 4-5 mytek 8x192 boxes for adda and Coleman Audio monitor controller,would be my choice for tracking/hybrid mixing,and call it done.