M-Audio M Track Duo HD Producer Pack Review: Hot Takes, Cold Opens

It’s never been easier to start a podcast. Technological barriers to sharing your opinions on culture, politics, and hot sauce have never been lower, which is—in theory—a tremendous boon for the so-called “marketplace of ideas.”

Should any idiot with a hot take be allowed to broadcast their brain slop far and wide? That’s an open question society is in the midst of tackling, so we’ll set that aside for now.

From a gear perspective, the more pressing question is whether or not you need access to nepo baby cash to acquire the mics, headphones, cables, and stands to get started. And in that regard, there’s great news for the everyman who thinks the world needs to hear their inner monologue as quickly and clearly as possible: Budget podcasting gear is cheap and plentiful. And it’s all over the place in terms of quality and functionality.

A great place to start looking is legacy brands that’ve been in the game for a while, and M-Audio’s new M Track Duo Producer Pack is an all-in-one package with an audio interface, headphones, and a condenser mic, tying a bow around an affordable and approachable point of entry into the digital creator space. It won’t dazzle you with options or features, but it can turn the voice in your head into ones and zeros for a low cost and minimal effort.

The Podcast Industrial Complex

M-Audio has long been the paragon of budget recording gear that’s functional and just a click or two above embarrassing to be seen with onstage. The early iterations of its Fast Track series of audio interfaces powered countless bedroom recordings way before being a Bedroom Artist had a proper aesthetic/genre tag applied to it, and it did so for pennies compared to the big guys like Avid and Apogee, who anchored the upper-price bracket of the segment.

Reddit users claim the Fast Track Pro still works on most pre-2019 computers, which is remarkable considering those that remain are left over from the second Bush era (and easy to find for under $50 on eBay). Class compliance—which allows users to simply plug the interface into their computer and get to work without messing around with drivers—proliferated in the early 2010s, and the modern-interface market is now overrun with small sub-$200 boxes that convert an analog audio source into a digital signal that’s easy to capture in Garage Band, Reaper, or any other high-end digital audio workstation (DAW).

Cheap junk is everywhere, which makes the presence of a reliable and affordable brand like M-Audio that much more valuable for plebs who have plenty of time for pontificating but very little time for gear research.