I have used the AK1 for about a year now, and have never had any isues with it, what so ever. Used it for several gigs as well. Always performes great.
I have used the AK1 for around 6mths now without a problem… until last night.
I’ll be obviously posting a full description with a beg for help on here and also the NI forum but basically i ran the card from around 10pm (later start than usual) unfortunately at around 12:00am the card decided to absoultely shit itself on me. To start with it sounded as though i was running filters through it as it dropped in and out of different frequency ranges. I ran with it for a while hoping for the best and then dropped into a cd for as long as i could go as the club i play at is a damn request club. I then fired it up again after a full restart of the computer to be sure and it slowly got worse to the point it was basiaclly filtering down to no sound coming out and not returning to normal fully. It also lost a significant amount of volume. I then jsut gave up and played a so fresh cd for the remaining half hour to a torrent of abuse as i couldnt get my mp3 player running through the other channel of the mixer due to other people having screwed with the system… gotta love it.
Hence at this point i would not rush into the AK1 but have a quick search around the NI forums to see if there has been anyone else experience similar problems.
Considering i was running the card at half volume for the first 2 hours and then slowly increasing to around 3/4 for the remainder i really don’t know what the hell is going on. Generally i haven’t needed to push the card past half way until last night and it has worked fine.
I have also had some traktor freeze problems which seem to be related to usb ports being under powered so i am starting to wonder whether the AK1 may have some sort of fault in it. More research to do.
Good luck with whatever you choose. I am not bagging the AK1 as it has worked fine until last night and i’m extremely dissapointed.