This is a review and quick measurements of the Donner Livejack portable audio interface (DAC & ADC). It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $80 as of this writing.
It is kind of a unique device with included battery and portability. Company provides an ASIO driver but I could not get it to work. It seems like a copy of the Theyscon driver which I have had similar issues with. The control panel installs and seemingly does things. But the ASIO driver asserts that the hardware is not there. Fortunately, it acts as a Windows class driver so I was able to use ASIO emulation to testing.
If you are not familiar with Donner, they are a player in the value oriented music instrumentation.
Donner Live Jack Interface Measurements
I started with DAC measurements, using Line Out:
It was disappointing to see less than 1 volt output instead of 2 volts. As is, both noise and distortion are quite high, ranking the Live Jack at the bottom of our interfaces:
Moving on to capture side, using the XLR input generates more disappointing results:
I could not go above 0.1 volt or so without the unit severely clipping. So I switched to Line In:
Performance remains the same while also not being able to tolerate anything above 0.9 volt.
For grins, I ran the IMD vs level sweep:
Conclusions
Company seems to have come up with nice feature set for the Live Jack interface. The price is very good as well. Alas, performance across both input and output is decidedly poor. Would have been nice to have a petter performing unit at $99 than what is presented here.
I can't recommend the Donner LiveJack audio interface.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
It is kind of a unique device with included battery and portability. Company provides an ASIO driver but I could not get it to work. It seems like a copy of the Theyscon driver which I have had similar issues with. The control panel installs and seemingly does things. But the ASIO driver asserts that the hardware is not there. Fortunately, it acts as a Windows class driver so I was able to use ASIO emulation to testing.
If you are not familiar with Donner, they are a player in the value oriented music instrumentation.
Donner Live Jack Interface Measurements
I started with DAC measurements, using Line Out:
It was disappointing to see less than 1 volt output instead of 2 volts. As is, both noise and distortion are quite high, ranking the Live Jack at the bottom of our interfaces:
Moving on to capture side, using the XLR input generates more disappointing results:
I could not go above 0.1 volt or so without the unit severely clipping. So I switched to Line In:
Performance remains the same while also not being able to tolerate anything above 0.9 volt.
For grins, I ran the IMD vs level sweep:
Conclusions
Company seems to have come up with nice feature set for the Live Jack interface. The price is very good as well. Alas, performance across both input and output is decidedly poor. Would have been nice to have a petter performing unit at $99 than what is presented here.
I can't recommend the Donner LiveJack audio interface.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/