FF800 and DP, calling all users

[gearboy]

Guys,

Thanks for all of the responses.

Here is the drill.

Everyone knows how in love with my BLA 828MKII I am, as I sing the praises of Black Lion all over the friggin' place. Enough said.

I've been rocking the MOTU hardware for 3 and a half years. It's been rock solid. I mean no problems it works like an SM57 works. But like the SM57, there is room for improvement. This is why I had it modded.

I found a FF800 for $1020 shipped. It's mint. I can score $500 to $600 for my stock 828mkII. I'm fine with paying the rest, as if I do not like the FF800 I can easily sell it for $1K. I like having two interfaces (backups people), but right now I'm not using the stock 828 because, well, I have seen the light.

Ok, preamps are better than stock 828. Cool. I'll only use them if I run out of my other channels. Nice to have extra preamps for location, etc.

Jeff

[AlteredMoods]

Eh, I'm not too hot on RME audio myself. Have a Hammerfall/Multiface which, while it produced good sound quality on my PPC Mac, also made it less reliable than a Windows box!

I thought about picking up a FF400/FF800 as a stand-in I/F until I finally go Metric Halo, but the Ultralite I bought kicks down the door pretty hard on its own (and more importantly, fits in my carryon bag )

Nothing against RME but they're...disinterested at best when it comes to Macs, from my experience.

[gearboy]

Nothing against RME but they're...disinterested at best when it comes to Macs, from my experience.

Ok, this is two warning me of this. Any more? If this is a problem of bad drivers I want to avoid it. I had M-Audio drivers plague my G5 and bring it to it's knees. I don't want to go through that again.

I'm still waiting to hear back from this guy regarding the deal for the FF800, so...

Jeff

[Timeline]

From this end I have two firefaces and they sound fantastic. That said if you current;y have a mkII and want them to work as a 16 track on PCI then another mk2 might make sense $$ wise. If you decide to dump the 2408-2 My friend is willing to pay $150 bucks right now and you can keep the card. He can't afford a FF800 or 400 unfortunately. Remember that a fw device and a pci might bean issue working together too. I have gotten noise when selecting both in "Machine setup" but never had issues with two motu pci interfaces. Your choice. I would recommend buying two ff-800's if sound is the thing you most desire.

Gook muck, ahem... luck,

[chrispick]

Ok, this is two warning me of this. Any more? If this is a problem of bad drivers I want to avoid it.

Yeah, I'm really curious about this too, especially regarding MacIntel compatibility. I'm thinking about upping my A/D/D/A from two to eight channel, and the RME stuff looks like a possible option provided they play nicely with DP and MacIntel.

Any other RME users care to chime in?

[kgdrum]

I don't know about Macintel drivers but RME has always written great drivers as far as PPC is concerned,and I have never had driver problems KG

[AlteredMoods]

I don't know about Macintel drivers but RME has always written great drivers as far as PPC is concerned,and I have never had driver problems KG

Perhaps with the FF drivers, but anyone who has a CardBuys RME kit knows of the multitude of issues that that card has. Even the latest drivers, which were last updated 20 months ago (check the website) still haven't fixed bugs that cause lockups, kernel panics and the like. Now perhaps the FF drivers are better. But I haven't had much luck with the latest Cardbus drivers.

Obviously my card won't work with my new mac, so I can't test it now. Even if it did, there's been no announcement of an Intel solution...

[kgdrum]

the original posters question is about the FF800,that is what I am addressing KG

[thermos]

Anyway, I want to see a show of hands from folks who have a FF800 and hear what you think of the drivers for both PPC and Intel, as well as stability and RME's mic preamp quality (very curious).

Thanks!

Jeff

I had some problems with stability with my 2 firefaces. It would happen on dense mixes, I would get crackles. I think the remedy was to use medium work priority, but I swear that that screws with the sound, especially for recording. The mic pres are a 3 on a scale of 1-10.

I think the conversion is pretty damn good for the money, but I bet you anything that the BLA modded 828 will sound better.

[vier-personen]

just to my 2 cents - I had the rme multiface and it‘s true, they had driver issues but one of the latest drivers fixed that for me.

with the fireface400 on a macbook now I didn‘t experience any problems so far (since december)... of course ymmv

[barks]

I switched to a FF800 recently. I also upgraded to a 2GHZ Dual Core Duo Intel iMac, 2gig ram DP5.11.

I used the entire system within a week of getting the FF800 to multitrack a live big band performance (over 2hours) at The Leeds College of Music.

The setup comprised the FF800, ADI-2, ADI-8 adat interface and Behringer ADA8000 adat interface, giving me a total of 26 inputs. I was dependent on the Venue console for the Mic Pres.

I had NO problems at all. It was rock solid for the entire 2 hours recording, and I have not had a single issue with it at my studio.

The small amount of tracking I have done using the onboard pres have been positive. The conversion is better than the 828 I previously used. I would put the FF800 on a similar par to the SONY DMX R-100 consoles that I have used.
I mix OTB into a 16 channel analogue console. I love the fact that you can flip the phase of a channel within the Total Mix matrix and that there is very useful metering as well.

What I did do though, is check the firmware AND driver versions and updated accordingly. It is worth checking at RME as they update regularly.

My only slight issue is that I get a small amount of RF interference into my console, but this is most likely due to the unbalanced tape-ins on the console, which means a bit of a rethink to the wiring. Un-Balanced to Balanced Hell!

I have heard that the RME Tech support is a bit unresponsive, but so far I have not needed any assistance, as it worked superbly straight out of the box but YMMV.

I hope this helps.

Barks

[gearboy]

Ok folks, here is the deal. I want stability. My 828 has been very stable. I'm bailing on the FF800 for now. Not sure what I'm going to end up doing with the stock 828mk2, although I may mod it and clock it to the BLA clock in my modded 828mk2.

Thanks for the feedback. Stability and blah blah mic preamps were the nail in the coffin. I have to keep telling my self that pretty doesn't = stable. sucks that folks are having such issues on the Mac with the RME stuff.

Jeff

[Mr_Clifford]

Thanks for the feedback. Stability and blah blah mic preamps were the nail in the coffin. I have to keep telling my self that pretty doesn't = stable. sucks that folks are having such issues on the Mac with the RME stuff.

Well for me, after having to deal with a flakey M-Audio driver for the Project Mix, the FF800 is absolutely rock-solid on my system. I think one of the keys is giving it it's own FW bus (be it 400 or 800). So far the mic pre's have seemed good, but obviously they're not going to compete with a dedicated Avalon or something.

[Timeline]

agreed. absolutely solid here with two ff800s on the 800 bus at any sr up to 96k. That's 20 channels live. I want to add a third but they keep raising the price. One time they did have a noise issue, about 6 months ago, and fixed it. That's it. No worries on Mac now at all. The mic pres are really handy too and the direct guitar inputs, although not Soldono's are very usable and dam close. It's a deal. MOTU's are certainly reliable as well. I just don't like the input tone. Maybe they will get their head out and make a high end electronically discrete, high headroom, analog front and back end pro IO. If MOTU did that I would buy it today and MOTU would win me back.