Recommend a Firewire Interface

Well, of the two you mention, the MOTU 896 would be my favourite. It has nice clean, neutral sounding pre amps and a good reputation for reliability. MOTUs get used a lot in professional theatre, particularly on Broadway. However, I'm surprised you've found a source where you can get it sub $1K (unless you're talking second hand of course).

I've never heard that particular model of Focusrite but others I've heard have been very nice--but not quite in the same league as the MOTU.

Do you NEED the facilities of a mixer? Don't forget that you're paying for lots of facilities you may or may not need and much of the design and build budget has gone into those rather than the basics. Of the two mixers you mention, I've not tried the Mackie but auditioned the Presonus carefully and rejected it. The mic pre amps are, at best, adequate but the lack of motorised faders was a real deal buster for me. It might not be as big an issue in a home studio situation but, even there, I tend to use several presets and the motorised faders to put them in the right place.

Having said all that, think long and hard about whether you want to invest in Firewire just now. It's very much a technology on the way out and I strongly suspect you'll have problems getting up to date drivers etc. during the service life of what you buy. Indeed, another big advantage of the MOTU is the hybrid USB2/FW interface. USB2 will stand you in good stead longer than Firewire I fear. (And I say all this as a current Firewire user worrying about what the future holds for me.)
 
zoom for under 400

its not fire-wire but I use a ZOOM R16 recorder/inter-phase/controller....good for my garage-studio.
and it only has 2 channels 48v...but if you are tracking it isn't an issue.
8 simultaneous channel recorder
and it will link up with 2nd machine for 16 channel simultaneous...
it stands alone without computer....
or plug it in to CPU and use it as an inter-phase and controller
easy 2 use

or splurge for the r24...more bells and whistles
 
Actually, Sweetwater has the MOTU 896 for $995. In the specs it shows firewire/USB so I suppose it would work with USB 2.0?? From what I read this afternoon there's not a big difference as far as perfomance between the two options, so I might as well go for something USB 2 compatible then if you think that's better.

And no, I don't really need the mixer features, I just thought maybe there would be an option out there that would give a little more features for the buck. But I guess you don't get that without sacrificing sound quality.
 
I have a couple of MOTU 896HD units and they are very versatile. I tend to use external preamps with them since the gain controls are very fiddly, particularly in the last few degrees. The 4-channel mic pre I built works very well with it and I have contruction details on my site (axtsystems dot com) for anyone interested. However with external preamps you don't really need the 48V supply since the preamp has that, just a balanced line in is sufficient.

I've heard some really good things about the Apollo interface from UAD. Worth looking at if you have the budget since it also incorporates DSP as well as some nice preamps.

- Geoff
 
A side note to the end of Bobbsy's post about firewire. I also had concerns about this, since all my equipment is firewire based and it is not supported on the new motherboards (and not on any new laptop if you use laptops for recording). The more recent motherboards appear to include thunderbolt, and TB to FW bridge cables are available to achieve a FW interface (hopefully it will work with the audio interfaces, that remains to be seen). Otherwise there are PCI-e firewire cards available for workstations with PCI-e slots.

Firewire and thunderbolt are both isochronous interfaces and are way more suited to realtime audio and video transport than USB, which is a packet-based interface. If you are recording a lot of channels at once (I have done 24 simultaneously) then USB2 is not really an option. USB3 might give you more channels, but I would not want to risk it. If you are only recording a few channels then you probably would not see any problems with USB.

- Geoff
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top