Alesis IO Dock for Apple iPad - Review

♫♪♫♪♫.........[Music playing] Hey it's John from CCI Solutions. I've been a worship leader for many years and still involved in worship today. And I was looking for tools that could help me do my job better, to lead worship better, to get the resources I need. And one of the things that was... really been a cool thing that I've gotten to use is the, is the Apple iPad. And, uh, I got a hold of that...It was, uh, something that I needed to be able to store my music on it. I wanted to be able to do some audio recording with it. I wanted to be able to do some Bible study work with it... ...some presentation...all of those things were available to me when I got the Apple iPad. One of the problems that I had was, the iPad wouldn't allow me, though, to connect easily to speakers, or to video, or...or bring microphone inputs into it. I needed those pro connections, uh, that the iPad doesn't automatically have. So along comes the Alesis iDock, a new pro audio interface piece for the Apple iPad. I'm thinking, "This is it!" This is rally what's going to help make this tool really work for me, in combining the things I want to do on the iPad normally, with the audio and video input and output tasks that I needed to do. So the new Alesis iO Dock...It's a nicely designed piece. It allows you to take either a standard iPad or an iPad 2 ...slide it right in...and it docks into the, into the iO Dock. And what it gives you, is it gives you all of these pro audio and video connections on the back. Now we're gonna talk a little bit more about what those are and how this is helpful. Right off the bat one of the cool things that it gives you is 2 XLR microphone inputs. And not, they're not only just microphone inputs, but they're...they're what we call "Combo jacks." They're XLR and they're 1/4 inch, uh TRS inputs as well. That means I can plug microphones. I can plug line level sources, keyboards, playback devices. I can, uh, plug instruments, guitars and things into there. And it comes...these come with a couple different level controls. So I can adjust the input levels. And this channel 2 over here, it allows me to switch between a guitar and an instrument level input. So I have a little bit of a pad on there to get just the right, uh input levels set up on this input here. So those are the inputs. And one of the other cool thing that it has is it has a, a phantom power switch so I can either turn phantom power to power condenser microphones on or off. Another input that it has...Let's go over on the side here... It's got a MIDI input and a MIDI output. So, if I want to use a MIDI controller, like a keyboard or something, uh to access MIDI sounds that are stored on my iPad, or a program that, that requires MIDI control, I can use that input for MIDI control. If I want to use my iPad to control something else, I can take the MIDI output and control another MIDI device from the iPad. So, MIDI in and out, another cool thing. And then on here also there is a, uhm, a USB input/output port to allow me to hook up from directly to a computer. And then, on the outputs....Let's take a look at some of those. First of all, there's a, there's a video output on the back. I wanted to talk about that. That's a really cool piece...and uh, when I do presentations, and I want to go out and, you know, show song...show the song lyrics up on the on a large screen or into a projector...I can actually take programs that that show, uhm, lyrics for songs in Power Point presentation types of devices and apps...uh, I can show those out through this video output. This is a standard RCA-type standard definition output, but that's a really useful piece there as well. Uh, I also have 2 line level output, main output jacks here. These are 1/4 inch TRS. and uh, left and right or...or channels 1 and 2. On the side I have a headphone out, with a separate level control for the headphones. And then I can control my main outputs with this control right here. So the Alesis iO Dock has a fulll compliment of inputs and outputs that makes my iPad now very accessible to be plugged into pro gear, speakers, amplifiers...uh, DAWs... computers, MIDI keyboards, projectors, screens, all of those things now are, uh, the connectivity for that is available for my iPad in one convenient box. ♪♫♪♫.....................[Music playing]