Digidesign, a heavy hitter in the professional audio market, powers many digital recording studios with its high-end hardware and Pro Tools software. Recently the company began offering lower-priced products to entice weekend warriors and dabbling musicians—first with its Digi001 audio interface, and now with the USB-based Digidesign Mbox ($450 street), a two-input, two-output audio interface that digitizes analog input and allows you to transfer the digital stream to a PC.

At 6.3 by 1.8 by 6.5 inches (HWD), the Mbox is small, but don't let its size fool you—it manages to pack in more than enough features for beginning studio musicians and even for some seasoned home-studio jockeys—all the necessary inputs and outputs, plus 48V phantom power for microphones that require it.

The kicker is Pro Tools LE 5.3.3, a slimmed-down version of the company's flagship Pro Tools application that fuels its high-end offerings. This powerful MIDI sequencing and hard-drive recording software has a steep learning curve at first, but the included example session file and good online documentation help you along. If you've always wanted to use this popular application but couldn't afford the expensive Digidesign hardware, the Mbox puts the software within reach.

If you want to connect your external synthesizers and drive them using Pro Tools LE, though, you'll need a separate MIDI interface—the Mbox doesn't have one. And although you can install either a Wave MME driver for standard Windows audio services or an ASIO driver for pro audio apps like Cubase, you cannot have both installed at the same time, which might prove troublesome for those who need to use different applications that require each of these standards. Also be aware that the Mbox is intended to be used for home studio purposes only and won't handle audio chores from games. We also wish the device would support either DirectSound or DirectSound3D, but it doesn't, nor does it support 24-bit, 96 KHz recording, an increasingly common feature found on audio interface cards costing around half as much as the Mbox.

Throughout our testing, however, the Mbox performed well. You can record only two tracks at a time, but Pro Tools LE is able to play up to 24 Wave audio tracks at one time, mixing this down to two tracks output via the Mbox's line output, S/PDIF output, and headphone jacks. Having two headphone jacks is a nice touch, since two musicians can monitor the playback while recording new tracks.

The Mbox performed well on our noise tests as well, with a noise floor of -96 dB RMS, meaning the device itself is quiet enough for recording. Portability is another upside—you can easily pack up the Mbox with a laptop computer for use on the road.

All told, the Digidesign Mbox offers versatile hardware, a great application in Pro Tools LE, and clean audio signal quality. True, $450 is a bit stiff, but the combination of software, hardware, and versatile I/O make this a good value.