Line 6 KB37 - any good?

cm01

I’ve got the opportunity to pick one up for about £60, just wondering if they’re any good? 

I’m just about to dip my toe into recording, so the simpler the better for me 

goldtop

Keyboard with audio interface - that one? 

If so, I looked at one a couple of years ago, but I think there was some driver compatibility thing that meant I didn't buy it. Might have been when I was after a class-compliant device, though.

Sleepyscholar

cm01 said:

I’ve got the opportunity to pick one up for about £60, just wondering if they’re any good? 

I’m just about to dip my toe into recording, so the simpler the better for me 

I have one, and it did what I wanted for quite a while: basically working as a space-saver. So in that sense I'd give it the thumbs up. If you want to start doing recording, and you want a single piece of kit that will make it possible (the one thing it doesn't offer is drum pads), this will work.

On the other hand, I found it far from simple to set up, and to this day I don't get why it was apparently necessary to use the GearBox application (with a bunch of amp and effects simulations) to route a signal into my DAW. It may have been possible to route directly, but every time I tried it I ran into some problem or other.

I also found it was highly cranky with the laptop I was using it on. If I booted up with the KB37 attached, most times the red lights would just flash on the KB37 and it wouldn't work. It had to be plugged in after boot-up, which is weird for a music interface.

More seriously, though, they haven't really sorted the drivers for Windows 10. The ones they provide sort of work, but I'd describe them as unstable. And there's minimal chance of them getting fixed: I had to wait years for them to arrive in the first place (I kept the laptop I used it on in Windows 7 for that reason).

I paid less than £60 for mine 5 years ago (I'm in Japan, though, so second-hand tends to be cheap). I'd be very dubious about paying more than £30 for one of these nowadays.