JOSH FIELSTRA: Hi. I’m Josh Fielstra, product specialist with Native Instruments, and I’m here showing off some of the new products, some of the five new products that we announced on October 13th. We announced four instruments, new instruments, and also one piece of hardware. I’m going to talk about the hardware right now.

Basically, what we have here is Audio Kontrol 1 which is a very, very compact professional audio interface. I’ve got it here and you can see a lot of the sort of knobs and buttons and all kinds of things that are on it. I’ll talk about those in just a moment but the basic summary is that his is a very compact form factor that is capable of going up to 192 kHz. If you want to run this 192 kHz, 24 bits, you can totally do that and everywhere in between from 44.1 all the way on up.

All of the inputs themselves are balanced. They actually have a dual Neutrik 1/4”/XLR input as well as a standard TRS balanced input, and both of these inputs have their own gain staging, their own preamp, and their own mic/line switch. I actually switch between line and mic level, they each have separate controls, and the XLR side is actually phantom powered as well if you want that. So, there’s actually a lot going on just with those two little inputs.

I actually have two output buses. On the back side of the interface, I have a total of four discrete output that is two stereo pairs which are also balanced as well as individual output controls for each of those busses, for outputs 1 and 2 and output 3 and 4, and I can direct monitor any of those outputs as well. I’ve got some direct monitoring functionality here where I can turn it on or off, switch it to mono as well as once again another gain stage here that I can control the direct monitoring output, and of course a headphone jack, which via the switch right here I can actually pick off either bus 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 so DJs will really dig this because you can actually run outputs 1 and 2 to house and pick up outputs 3 and 4 as like a cueing bus and that has its own separate headphone control.

On the back side, you can see here that it’s actually bus powered via USB 2.0, and it’s also a MIDI interface on top of that, so lots and lots of connectors in this deceptively small interface. Here’s 48-volt phantom power I was mentioning earlier.

On the top of this interface, I actually have a large knob and three individual buttons. Here’s the thing with the control on top of this thing. These can send pretty much anything. I can send MIDI off of these buttons, freely configurable, or I can send things like operating system key commands. You know, I can send a letter K if I wanted to, and I can also program it such that when they turn the button to the left it does one thing, and when I turn it to the right it does another thing. If I turn it left, maybe it’s sending MIDI program change. If I turn it to the right, maybe it’s sending control X or something like that.

Plus, the buttons have the same functionality and I can also set up combinations as well. So, I might -- if I hold this button down and turn the knob, it might do one thing. Hold this button down and turn the knob, it might just do something completely different. What a lot of people are using this for is using the button say for master gain like a DJ program like Traktor, and then if I hold the left button down, that controls the left deck’s volume. Hold the right button down, turn the knob, and it controls the right deck. So, you can do all kinds of different things and actually have the software editor loaded up here on my machine, so you can take a look at that what that looks like. Here’s where I can make all of these assignments for the knob, the left button, middle button, and then combinations of those buttons. If I want the left button to be a modifier, I hit modifier. Now, while I hold the left button down, I can select a completely new set of functionality for the other buttons. Just when I’m holding the left button down, they can do something different.

Here’s the window actually for the knob. You can see the big -- all the different choices I have here between MIDI or sending an operating system key. Here’s a little bit about what I’m talking about earlier. There on the MIDI side, you can actually send MIDI notes, aftertouch, all kinds of different controller-type messages, and here’s my note pitch, the individual velocity, and that’s just when I turn the knob left. I’ve got a completely different set of things I can do when I turn it right, so extremely assignable. This is good for programs that actually might not allow you to automate a particular parameter like say the transport control. Sometimes you can’t control that via a MIDI note or a MIDI controller. You can get around that here by sending a key command. I might be able to hit the enter key when I press the left button.

So, lots of cool stuff going on here. The drivers are very tight. You can go down to single digit latency, and that’s kind of Audio Kontrol in a nutshell. It actually ships -- In addition to the controller itself, it also comes with Xpress Keyboards, which is a slimmed down version of our FM7 plugin, our B4 plugin, and Pro 53 as well as Traktor LE, which is our lite version of our Traktor DJ software, and Guitar Combos, a lite version of Guitar Rig. So, it comes with a lot of software on top of that.