THIS HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL – Avermedia Live Streamer AX310 Review

This thing has so much potential to be an amazing accessory for an impressively wide range of people, and yet, as it stands, I’m not sure I could recommend it to anyone. This is Avermedia’s Live Streamer AX310, a confused mix of audio interface and a StreamDeck. On the back you’ll find a DC in jack – yes this thing needs wall power – alongside a USB B port, SPDIF input, a 3.5mm input, an XLR/ 1/4” combo input, line out and headphones out. On the front you’ll find a 5 inch IPS touchscreen, four massive silicone buttons and six labelled volume dials. Confused yet? The idea here is clearly to combine both your XLR mic input AND your StreamDeck like functionality, although that sets a pretty high bar. It not only has to be a good XLR input device, but also match what is undeniably the standard right now, Elgato’s StreamDeck. So, does it do both well?

On the mic input side, well you’ll be hearing that throughout this video. I’m using a Shure MV7 here – a mic that normally requires a whole lot of gain – and I’m having to record this at 100% mic level to get anything close to level so I guess nothing changes there. I had some headphones plugged in during testing and enabled the output monitoring and found there was a bit of a processing delay between them. It wasn’t a big enough delay to do the whole speech jammer type thing, but it was enough to feel like I had a chorus effects pedal enabled trying to listen to myself.

One thing I should note on the audio side is that the six dials on the front edge are fixed. What their labels say they do is all they do. You can’t reprogram them, you can’t set them to control an audio source in OBS or manage anything other than the audio directly running through this unit. The “System” dial doesn’t even control your system audio level! It only controls the output level from this thing, not the Windows audio level. That seems strange to me.

On the StreamDeck front then, that’s where I feel like it really falls behind. The fact they’ve gone with an unobstructed touchscreen does give the AX310 some unique options for multi-block panels – the audio controls/visualisation panel is a full page panel for example – but that does also have its drawbacks. Unlike the StreamDeck which has physical push-in buttons, or the Loupedeck Live which has a haptic motor to give kinesthetic feedback when you press a button, on the AX310 you get nothing but a visual queue on screen (you know, the part of the screen you are covering with your finger as you press on the screen?). That means you have to be fairly active in pressing any given action, rather than the StreamDeck where as long as you roughly get the area correct you can be sure you are only pressing one button.

When it comes to what actions you can map here, that’s also a bit of a let down. As you might expect you can map all of Avermedia’s own software options like their ReCentral streaming software, along with basic things like web links and text entry. You can use OBS actions, but there’s a catch. Unlike every other control pad I’ve used, Avermedia decided to not use the standard OBS API to control your stream… No, you need to install their own OBS plugin which creates a websocket that the AX310 connects to locally. This does mean you get a few more controls than standard – although Elgato just updated their software to add a load more native options too, but it’s another thing you need to install just to make the thing work, and you have to hope that it’s reliable enough to not mess up your stream or recordings – something I can’t guarantee as I had an issue where the entire unit just wouldn’t register touch inputs until I restarted my whole PC. Hell, if you visit avermedia.com rather than www.avermedia.com you’ll get a failed to load SSL error because their DNS records aren’t set up correctly.

The main feature Avermedia was excited for me to test with this was the Voicemod support – they even gave me a one month trial to Voicemod Pro – and sure it’s cool to be able to control these options, but unsurprisingly the StreamDeck supports all those actions too. As far as I can tell there aren’t any benefits to Voicemod running on the AX310 compared to even using a USB mic with no audio interface, especially since Voicemod is still a standalone program you have to have running, not a native plugin running on the unit itself. But sure, funny voice effects are funny.

Something that I think is beautifully symbolic of the lack of polish that the user experience of this thing has is installing one of currently five optional plugins. Let’s say you want to install the Voicemod plugin right? Makes sense. Well there is a “widget store” option in the bottom left, let’s just open that… Wait, why is the web browser open? NO WAY. Ok fine maybe the download link opens in their control centre software to install the plugin… Oh, not it’s downloading a sketchy .creatorCental file that you have to then manually import in their software. Sigh. Let me show you how to install a plugin on the StreamDeck. Click on the store icon. Click plugins. Click download. Done. No web browser or file imports needed.

And there are literally thousands of plugins available, there are icon packs, royalty free songs and sound effects all here. The AX310 has five total plugins currently, and one of them is a clock. They mention “ongoing development” as a selling point on their product page, but I can’t evaluate a product based on future functionality that may or may not come. The biggest thing for me is that beyond the fact this is an audio input device, this doesn’t distinguish itself well enough to be a suitable replacement for a StreamDeck. The Loupedeck I mentioned, that can do streaming stuff, but it also integrates with the Adobe suite of apps well to act as an editing control pad too, which is why I have both a StreamDeck XL and a Loupedeck Live on my desk right now.

When I first unpacked the AX310, my first thought was that this could be a great little live-looper unit. It could do with having another XLR / quarter inch input to be able to connect both a mic and an instrument, but even still you could use the big four buttons as record options, set the dials for different options like reverb, distortion, and overdrive, and the display allowing for further controls, sound placement and even visualisations of recorded sounds. But as it stands, that isn’t even remotely possible, especially since you can’t remap the dials at all.

The vast majority of the issues I’ve mentioned are fixable with firmware updates. The dials being hard-coded to those inputs, probably not, nor the fact that this is an IPS panel with horrific IPS glow – and OLED would have been a lot nicer here – but that’s what I mean about this having lots of potential. With enough work in software updates, this could be an excellent bit of kit. As it stands though, I’d rather grab a StreamDeck and a Focusrite Scarlett Solo for the same sort of money as one of these. I’m going to keep an eye on this though to see how they get on with that development and maybe in a few months time it might be a great option.