Griffin StudioConnect for iPad

If you're an iPad musician, the Griffin StudioConnect ($149.99 direct) could be your salvation. The StudioConnect  lets you connect your electric guitar, bass guitar, or MIDI keyboard to your iPad. It looks sharp, and puts your iPad front and center as the centerpiece of a music studio. But considering its price, and the lack of an easy way to record vocals, it's tough to see a large market for the StudioConnect.

Design, Headphone Jack, and MIDI Ports
Griffin designed the StudioConnect well. It has some weight to it, and the bottom panel features a pair of oversized, non-skid rubber feet. The dock insert is also covered in rubber. Put the StudioConnect on your desk, dock the iPad, and it's not going anywhere. The built-in dock connector is black, and runs on a short, one-foot gray wire that you can tuck neatly behind the iPad while it's docked. Plug the included AC adapter into the wall, and a blue ring lights up around the oversized chrome volume knob.

The front-mounted, standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack is convenient, but seems redundant at first glance—why not just use the one on the iPad? Use the one on the StudioConnect, though, and you can leave the headphones attached to the dock, which means one less thing to connect and disconnect whenever you move the iPad. You also get to control volume with the massive chrome knob, which is much easier than using the iPad's fiddly volume controls (which reverse orientation in landscape mode). Finally, you can switch between audio coming out of the main speakers and through the headphones at will.

The MIDI In and Out ports mean you can position the iPad to the left or right of a much larger controller keyboard, and then use the iPad as your recording device. The same problem that plagued the ($69.99, 3.5 stars) also affects the StudioConnect: By using MIDI ports, your MIDI controller needs an AC power adapter. Most of today's budget-priced MIDI keyboards don't come with one, as they run off of USB power, and many don't even have a DC port at all, so you can't even buy one at, say, RadioShack. Just keep that in mind when planning your setup; you're probably going to need multiple pieces (including the StudioConnect, if you go this route) no matter what.

Audio Recording and Conclusions
The StudioConnect does its job well, with clean audio quality and transparent operation throughout. I tested it with ($4.99, 4 stars), ($4.99, 4.5 stars) and ($29.99, 4 stars). The MIDI ports worked fine with an M-Audio KeyStation 49i MIDI keyboard, which I powered with the appropriate AC adapter. Unfortunately, the lack of an XLR jack with phantom power gets in the way. While you can technically buy a quarter-inch-to-XLR adapter for a microphone, that won't sound quite as good, and only works for unpowered dynamic mics like the Shure SM57 anyway. (This is what you had to do with inexpensive four-track tape recorders 20 years ago.)

A better option would be to use an inexpensive, external stereo mixer from Behringer, Samson, or a low-end Mackie, plug all of your mics into that, turn on phantom power, and then run the outputs of the mixer into the stereo 3.5mm input on the back of the StudioConnect. That will at least get you better quality recordings of vocals and other instruments through GarageBand, ($19.99, 3.5 stars), or any other app that supports digital audio tracks or sampling.

So the Griffin StudioConnect is expensive, and doesn't do everything I'd like to see it do. It's not a bad product, but I can't help but be disappointed by the lack of a mic preamp, XLR input, and phantom power. Virtually every PC and Mac audio interface these days, no matter how inexpensive, has at least one mic preamp. Other options: The ($399, 4 stars) costs considerably more, but adds these features and many others; it's still the best iPad recording interface out there, although it's far from perfect. The IK Multimedia iRig MIDI is a good way to save money if you just want to hook up a MIDI controller to your iPad, and don't need the StudioConnect's charging features, stereo outputs, or extra headphone jack, but the StudioConnect is a much neater solution as a result of those features. Finally, the ($89, 3.5 stars) is a good choice if you don't have a MIDI controller at all; just be sure to buy the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit ($29) along with it, as the Carbon 49  has no dock connector of its own.

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