If you had $2000 to spend.

  • Thread starter Thread starter jaybriggs84
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So for now are you just looking into upgrading the preamps then? I'd stick with the firepod, since I've had great results using it solely for line-inputs with better preamps, even with the DMP-3. The built-in preamps are definitely not even decent quality - they'll do if all you want is an interface, but you really need to step uip a bit to get, at the very least, a lot of clean gain, if not much more transparency / clarity and headroom.
 
Have you heard any of the new Motu FW interfaces. You could get an 828MKII and a 8 pre for about $1250 that would give you 18 inputs plus SPDIF and MIDI.
BTW: their stuff works great with both MAC and PC. The pres sound better than the ones in the firepod. But you would still want something with a little more pizazz for voclas etc.
 
Well, I don't really have a room of my own I can just put up acoustic treatment, otherwise I would have done that a long time ago. For vocals and electric guitar I do those in a closet that has a bunch of stuff in it that deadens it some.

I'm lookin at the RME stuff, like the fireface 800 or multiface. What I'm most worried about is getting a piece of gear that has really good A/D conversion. I will probably add a seperate A/D converter like a mytek or a lucid ad9624 so I can 2 really good channels of conversion when I'm tracking things that I only need 1 or 2 inputs for. I'm not as worried about preamps on units because I will probably end up going outboard for that anyway.
 
the fireface converters are fucking sweet, and the preamps aren't all that bad either

to be honest i've never used the pres in a fireface, but there was a shootout on another forum a couple weeks ago with some electric guitars that were re-amped through several pres, and the preamps in the fireface sounded marginally worse than vintech, great river, and API pres.
 
Ironklad Audio said:
the fireface converters are fucking sweet, and the preamps aren't all that bad either

to be honest i've never used the pres in a fireface, but there was a shootout on another forum a couple weeks ago with some electric guitars that were re-amped through several pres, and the preamps in the fireface sounded marginally worse than vintech, great river, and API pres.
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Well I would expect those pres you mentioned to be much better since those pres alone are more expensive that the entire RME unit
 
you could pick up a couple of sound treatment units that just just in the corner or come on a stand. Bucks to bucks this would likely make the biggest difference in your recordings.

I run my mic's straight into my lavry and normalize in software. Not for everybody or every situation but talk about transparent :). I can't monitor the input while I record but it's not bothering me at all.

I don't know if it's healthy from a gear point of view but I don't see a problem and the noise floor of the converter isn't the worst part of my projects right now. The Lavry is pretty quiet and comes with 12db of gain I've got twisted all the way up. I think my signal is around -20 db, something like that, I forget.

I have never heard the Mytek but reviews are good and it hits the price point. You can buy converters all the way up to $10000 and more, and then probably still want the next greatest thing in a couple years. From what I've read the Myteks are right on the line of prosumer/pro, which might put them on the sweet spot for around half of your $2000.

My next pre is a probably an nv1, and ya, I got a dedicated phantom unit for my condensors if you were wondering.
 
behringer products are def not gonna be the upgrade im looking for
 
Dewayne2 said:
Why would you recommend DMP3's?
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DMP3 is generally known to be a decent preamp...

Your conveter ~$900
RNP ~$500?
MPX ~$1000?
Total: ~$2500
If find used, total would be ~$1700
If you don't find used, you can settle for DMP3 for now, and keep looking for a great deal for the others...
 
I got the RNP for 400 used, I'm still thinkin about getting the fireface 800 too
 
jaybriggs84 said:
I got the RNP for 400 used, I'm still thinkin about getting the fireface 800 too
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I've reaserched the Fireface a bit and I was impressed. Haven't had the chance to go hands-on with it but the more I read here the more I'm inclined to believe I'm right to be impressed.

Any of you guys actually own the unit? If so, how would you compare it to similar Presonus units?
 
Trell Blaze said:
I've reaserched the Fireface a bit and I was impressed. Haven't had the chance to go hands-on with it but the more I read here the more I'm inclined to believe I'm right to be impressed.

Any of you guys actually own the unit? If so, how would you compare it to similar Presonus units?
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Mine is still in the mail... :D:D:D
 
One thing I don't like about the Fireface is that there isn't even a knob on it to control your monitor level
 
jaybriggs84 said:
One thing I don't like about the Fireface is that there isn't even a knob on it to control your monitor level
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Why do you need yet another volume control in your signal path? I think just software is enough already... I'll see how it works out though in practice.


I got the RNP for 400 used, I'm still thinkin about getting the fireface 800 too
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Oh, sorry. Somehow I missed that part. I was still thinking that you want to get 2 ch Mytec. Ok, so you are up for about $1200-1500 for the converter, and you've already spend 400 on pre. about 100-400 left... So at this point you can either get a a really nice used preamp (if you need another preamp, which I think you are planning to get one), or a DMP3... And you'd still be close in the $2000 budget... Not sure how strict you are on that number though...
 
All together I will probably have a little over 2000, I just haven't found a buyer for my laptop yet. I sold my old BMX bike and used that money for a RNP.
 
jaybriggs84 said:
All together I will probably have a little over 2000, I just haven't found a buyer for my laptop yet. I sold my old BMX bike and used that money for a RNP.
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Wow, you are getting serious about this... :p


I just got my Fireface 800 today. Sweet unit. Setup was a piece of cake. Took no more than 5 minutes to install drivers and have a sound coming to my computer. I had to play around with the mixer to finally get the sound out into headphones/output. But that only took me 10-20 minutes maybe.

Since unit was shipped to my brothers' place (I was planning to be there this Sat) we laid down a few tracks using the Fireface (he is using Cakewalk). On overall it is a pretty straightforward (I'd even say user friendly) unit. Worked well with both Vista and XP. The only think I need to figure out is the mixer ... Although I think I'm getting the hang of it already...

I tried a couple of motu units before. One I never got to work ($500 unit) and other I had to spend time to finally get it to work ($1000 unit)... At the end it did not work 100% with reaper. Had latency issues. I had to reduce the buffer size to almost eliminate latency. If I reduce the buffer to omuch, the sound was all choppy. During recording I also got few "clicks" that got recorded every once in a while.
Motu worked 100% with Vegas though. Unfortunately I have a very old version of Vegas so it doesn't work on Vista. Fireface does not seem to have any latency issues with Reaper. For motu I concluded that perhaps reaper and motu didn't mesh well, although the unit seemed sturdy and was relatively easy to use.

Just thought I'd share this with you... :D
 
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