BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. Once again, I’m Bill Holland and this is the small little interface, the Lexicon Lambda. This is a product from Lexicon and you’ll hear me right now talking through the Mic 1 input.I’m going out through my outputs, the left output actually, on this interface. Pretty cool little number, it’s pretty easy to get this for under $100. It has two mic inputs, two line inputs, a monitor mix, an output level mix, and also an instrument input which doubles on Line 1 right here, see it right there. You can either make these be stereo or feed then in as separate mono. And also down here, you can see the monitor can be made to be mono or stereo.

On the back side, we have two line ins, an insert, one and two, microphone and mic 2 although the inserts cancel out the mic inputs so keep that in mind, left and right output, MIDI and then USB connector for the computer. Also, phantom power switch is located on the back.

Now, you hear right now I’m talking through this, really nice delivery of the audio. It can go up to, I believe this is 24-bit, 192 kHz although it has trouble in a lot of DAWs actually getting past 48 I’ve noticed or you can do 24 usually on it but it has -- it chokes up once you try to go above 48. And one thing to keep in mind as well is that the actual drivers that Lexicon provides don’t work well with this unit at all. In fact, I experienced incredible latency problems and some other things. But a workaround that actually has worked out really well for me (I use this more as like a monitor on one of my video systems, just a way to send out audio to the speakers that’s a step up from, say, normal computer audio), one thing you want to do is download a driver called ASIO4All, and what that allows you to do is actually assign your WDM devices and it just runs it. There are more products that ASIO4All runs, but specifically with the Lexicon low level stuff, you really want to make sure you download those drivers and install them.

Now, let’s check out the input here. I’ve got my mic on. You see I’m getting hot there. I can go back down and bring it up to a reasonable level. You’ll see my level turns to red when I peak right there. You see that? I can go back down, and now let’s run an instrument through it real quick. I have our Schecter bass hooked up so I’ll go grab that and I’ll show you how that sounds coming through the input.

[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING A SCHECTER 8-STRING BASS GUITAR THROUGH THE LEXICON LAMBDA AUDIO INTERFACE]

Okay. That should give you an idea of how this unit sounds with instrument. It sustained a few notes and they’re just so you could hear how it sounds when it’s recording sustain and you’re picking up the ambience in the room, and it’s actually a very pretty clear unit. The preamps are actually not as bad as you would have expected and it sounds really good for what it is. The biggest thing is just to make sure you get those drivers so that the unit works correctly with your system. This is the Lexicon Lambda, and for now I’m Bill Holland on Gearwire.Com.