I seem to remember a rumor that said one of the delays of this product was the fact that the switching supply to create 48v put noise on the inputs at a guess I would say thats your story and 30v is the compromise fix to get this product to market.
That said this is a fantastic product at the right price and if your going to use mics that need 48v at 10ma then you are going to be useing an esoteric pre-amp as well i think a lot of you expect to much for too little money.
To put this in perspective, i am useing a Sound Devices mix-pre as my font end and that cost over $600 dollers just for 2 mic pre,s and no a2d.
No firmware is going to fix this and you can whine as much as you like it is what it is, only a revision to the hardware or maybe a version 2 will fix this, remember the JB3 did not come close for taping untill version 3 and this thing is almost there.
Large difference here. The JB3 was never promoted as a taping device. It took several versions to iron out the taper specific issues. The M-Audio was very much designed to be a field recorder from the outset. Claiming to be a "pro recorder" lands your product in a critical circle.
From their website...
"2-channel WAV and MP3 recording and playback for pro recording, meetings, training, education and worship"
It was promoted as having 48v phantom and now doesn't? Just a quick glance through the list of compatible mics is enough to indicate it wasn't intentional. Not to mention it makes little business sense to deviate from the 48v "standard".
Now I'd agree that I wouldn't expect the pre to be very good at that price point, but if I were a stealth taper intending to use it as an all in one solution w/ some 48v mics I'd be upset. Nobody expects it to be perfect out of the box, but I wouldn't consider this issue in particular to be a minor oversight or bug they didn't catch.
To their credit, they're making an effort to address it, and I'm glad they did it here as well.
Mitch