First of all, if you're not gonna use this interface with plugins, you can safely skip this review - it probably won't matter to you.
However, this to me seems an interface that was created specifically to plug in direct with your guitar and use plugins: it has an abundance of features, most of which I deem quite silly to be honest, like the JFET/Pure switch or the Sharp/Bold Z-Tone knob to me are just marketing gimmicks and have no real use.
One actually great feature is the presence of the pedal jacks on the back: this way, for a fairly simple setup, I can control my plugins with basic switches (that cost just a few tens of euros) instead of having to buy a separate MIDI controller (a basic but decent one easily sets you back 100-150€).
But I digressed.
The point here is that this is an interface designed to work with a direct guitar signal.
Despite all those fancy features mentioned above then, it baffles me how this interface can fail so spectacularly at one of the most basic things: the monitoring section. As stated before, I bought this to use with plugins, so direct monitoring is useless to me (and reasonably to anyone who plugs in direct - i.e., the target user of this product), therefore I keep the Monitor knob all the way to the right on DAW to hear just the guitar sound processed by the plugins. And yet, with the knob in this position, some direct signal still bleeds through, making it very unpleasant at best an extremely annoying at worst to use this product. I have no way of knowing if this is actually the cause of the issue, but it feels like the potentiometer can't travel all the way to the right-most position and it stops just short of that, landing on a mix that is 95% DAW + 5% Direct or something like that.
By reading many online posts, I gather the manufacturer seems to be aware of the issue but just chucks it to user error or inexperience with the realm of plugins (and judging by the users replies, this is actually true for many of them). However, I can be sure that my software routing is correct and this is an interface-level issue because the same setup with another interface doesn't exhibit the same problem.
Until this is fixed, this product is unusable to me, so I'm returning it.
(I tried contacting the IK Multimedia support about this but I'm yet to receive a reply)
