1010music bluebox

It's really hard to give a one-word evaluation of the sound because the internal sound quality is quite superb, it has great dynamic range without distortion, the effects are difficult to dial, but pretty great quality, and overall it behaves quite nicely. But

But it's really really sensitive to bad power. It may turn off on you if you use a lesser cable, and there's ground noise if your setup is kinda finicky. Right now I have a base noise that's quite noticeable if gain or volume are to high in some tracks or master, but it's quite manageable since you can get good quality sound with lower levels. I'm sure if I took the time to find what's the source of the noise issues I'd be able to clean it up.

One more issue is that the inputs are too close together, so you need good quality cables with small tips.

All things considered, it packs a lot in a very small package, and can handle from instrument to eurorack levels, so if desktop real state is an issue and you want flexibility, it's a good choice.

Before getting the bluebox, if I wanted to record a jam or similar, I needed to plug all the synths into my line mixer, fire up the daw, set up a session, etc etc.

With this, I literally wake it up and hit record. Brilliant box, massive timesaver and means I can record whatever I'm doing whenever I want.

Sound quality is good, haven't had any noise issues. The supplied microSD card needs replacing, and the new firmware allows you to use it as an interface, which is insane for the price. It takes up very little room too, which was a huge bonus.

Be warned about the cable size though - the cheap cordial cables I bought needed cutting down in order to get them to fit properly!

Its small, well built, lots of inputs and perfect handling for the most basic set of features (naming tracks and flexible input assignment are huge)

On the other hand, the menus and the placement of the knobs are not very self-explanatory, and it's missing a small but critical feature: the ability to replay in loops the captured wav files. They might think that this will undermine the Blackbox sales, but what's surprising is that the latest Blackbox firmware lacks this feature in reality as well!

If that was present I would give it a shining 5-star review. Otherwise a solid small powerful mixer, with fair (but not top of the notch) recording capabilities