E-Mu xboard 25 Specification Guide

T

raditionally better known for
making hardware that lives
inside your computer – and,
of course, for being pioneers
of the hardware sampler – 

E-mu has leapt into the crowded USB
MIDI keyboard market with its latest
offerings, the Xboard 49 and its smaller
sibling, the Xboard 25. The 25 is
designed for greater portability, and the
49 as more of a desktop controller,
although it’s still compact enough to
be carried in a bag. 

The concept is now very familiar. A
USB connection can carry both power
and MIDI data, and a MIDI Out port
can send data straight to an interface,
or be used to send MIDI to other
devices from a sequencer, having first
passed through the USB cable. The
Xboard can be powered by a regular
power adaptor or by batteries, which is
helpful when you’re in the field and
don’t want to drain your laptop battery.

There’s also a pedal port, which, of
course, is a must for any serious
keyboard playing. 

Cosmetically the Xboard is a 

little uninspiring and isn’t likely to be
much of a talking point, although
design isn’t important to everyone. 
The keys are full-sized with velocity
sensing and aftertouch, and are
perfectly adequate for a unit at this
price. The pitch bend and mod wheels
are solid, as are the 16 control knobs,
but the function buttons are a bit on
the wobbly side.

The variable control knobs have 

a silky smooth action, and their sheer
number is useful for the increasing
number of programs that offer 
real-time control as a feature. Reason
3.0 would be a good partner for the
Xboard, for example, because the
knobs would be automatically mapped
to instruments as you selected them.
The three-digit LED readout is quite
restrictive, but practically all other
keyboards of this kind use the same
type of system. 

The Xboard’s function buttons give 
you access to a good selection of
tools, including patch select, quick
octave transpose, Latch mode for
triggering drum loops, and knob
bypass that temporarily stops the
knobs sending out any data. The 
idea is that you can set the controls
directly to the desired position 
without having to cycle through 

values. There’s also a snapshot button,
which captures and transmits all the
current settings. 

The keyboard can store patches 

in its 16 memory locations. Half of 
the keys are labelled with functions,
which makes getting around easier
and means you’re slightly less reliant
on the small screen. With Latch 
mode activated you can assign a
range of keys to act as triggers for
loops, while the rest remain playable
as normal, which is a handy feature 
for live performance. 

With so many competing keyboards 
at this price point, it’s often the added
extras that give one model the edge
over another. The Xboard is, of course,
dual-platform and will work with Mac
OSX and Windows 2000/XP, and
there’s a librarian/patch editor 
program supplied for both.
Unfortunately for Mac users, that’s
where the freebies end because the
rest of them are Windows-only. If 
you are working on a PC, you get the
Proteus X LE software sound module
and a version of Ableton’s Live Lite 4
to play with. This is slightly odd, given
that Live is available for the Mac as
well as Windows.  

The Xboard is a good controller

keyboard, and has everything you’d
expect, such as USB power and MIDI,
real-time controllers and full-sized
keys. The key action is good and 49 
of them is a decent number for general
MIDI use. That said, it doesn’t
particularly outshine any of its
competitors. There’s no killer feature
that stands out, especially for Mac
users. At least Windows users get the
additional software, which may be a
clincher. At similar prices there are
other near-identical products which all
do an equally good job, so in the end
the decision may come down to looks,
small price differences or whether you
prefer E-mu kit. 

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SUMMARY

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VERDICT

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

★ ★ ★

MAGAZINE  

October 2005  71

Manufacturer E-mu
Price £110
Contact 0800 901 2168
Web www.emu.com
Minimum system requirements
PC Windows 2000 (SP4)/XP (SP1), spare
USB port
Mac Mac OSX 10.2, spare USB port

With more and more hands-on software out there, portable
USB MIDI keyboards are the order of the day. Hollin Jones
gets to grips with E-mu’s Xboard 49…

E-mu

Xboard 49

review

E-MU

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MTM31.Review xboard  8/25/05  5:06 PM  Page 1