My new Xone:3D equipment arrived on Friday. Since then I have been spending a fair amount of my free time obsessing over it, learning all the features, and getting all the components properly pieced together.

The Xone:3D comes with custom face-plates specifically for Ableton Live (which is my DJ tool of choice). There is also a template available for download on the Allen & Heath web site. This template sets up all the configurations for a really great integration with Ableton Live.

The biggest difficulty I have had so far is the lack of Vista 64-bit drivers. Actually, I was unable to get the drivers loaded even on my Vista 32-bit laptop. So, for now, I am actually DJ’ing over remote desktop…as bizarre as that seems.

Current, I have 3 Ableton tracks mapped to 3 mixer inputs on the Xone 3D. From here I can use all the powerful A&H mixing and MIDI controls to manipulate the sounds in whatever ways I’d like. Later I will post some videos of mixer tricks I have figured out.

I then use ASIO4ALL and Ableton Live to wire the Xone 3D’s sound card output (Mix Output) to the sound output of a small USB sound card on my PC which is running over remote desktop. This allows me to hear and record the output of the mixer without having to use special hardware. In a gig scenario, this would instead pipe directly to the house stereo.

So I gotta say I really love this new setup and I can’t wait to see all the things that can be done with it. I will be posting more about this new equipment as I get more familiar with it.