Motu Traveler or Focusrite Saffire Pro 26i/o

[Elec]

Hi,
I got a 896HD and I‘m really satisfied.
Now I want to buy another interface to take this on tour and on stage. I‘m interested in the Traveler and I think it is grear interface, but it has only 4 mic ins and 4 line ins.

what else? the price.
it is compared to the focusrite saffire 26io too expensive, I think.
the focusrite has 8 mic ins/line ins and every feature of the Traveler, too.

But the focusrite is roughly 200•‚¬ cheaper. Why the hell shall i buy the Traveler and not the saffire?
Is it so much better or are there any other reason to buy the Traveler instead of the focusrite?
Thanks Elec

[baanes]

well, as far as I know the saffire 26 hasn't been released, so you can't get one just yet. Sweetwater does list it but i don't believe it has shipped.

The saffire will probably have better preamps, along with the effects plugins and 8 more channels of adat. It lacks aes/ebu i/o and smpte sync, neither of which are useful for some people, and while the saffire can be bus-powered it can't accept an external battery (again, not a big issue). However, I heard on another forum that the saffire 26 may not have onboard mixer functionality. Focusrite doesn't advertise this, but it seems silly to leave out. I would recommend waiting until the saffire is out and people can confirm that it does sound as good as it looks, as it does look pretty awesom.

[djencode]

a buddy of mine once told me that if it isn't high end focusrite then the name doesn't mean anything. im going to have to agree with that. i owned an mbox with focusrite preamps in it and they were complete garbage. in retrospect the best pre's i've dealt with were the motu ones followed by m-audio. now while the average user doesn't partake in aes/ebu or wordclock the lack of external power is a big baddy, especially if you plan on going live. a laptop can last about 3-4 hours with battery which is enough for a set. but providing power to an external sound card too?.. thats iffy.

it does have a lot of i/o which is a plus, but personally, i have 2 ultralites and im very happy with them, apart from the windows driver issues im experiencing currently, and needing 1024 buffer size for 44.1 s/pdif when my mac side only needs 256, but im sure that wil be worked out eventualy with updates. other than that it's a fantastic piece of hardware, has 8 analog ins, and is cheaper than both the traveller and the sapphire.


edit : ok so the sapphire has external power and word clock

[Elec]

ok, i understand you love your ultralite.
I need 4 mic ins (ultralite=2mic ins) and I don‘t understand if it‘s possible to use the line ins for mics.
for what does motu include these AES connectors. I didn‘t find a cool hardware to use these ones, but they cost extra money.

[kelldammit]

i had one of the original saffires, and i ended up buying a traveler. i do prefer the traveler. the drivers for the motu turned out to be a LOT more efficient. when i switched to the traveler, i could add several more vi's, AND bump up the sample rate/bit depth on a project that was redlining with the saffire...
it's seldom that you see something that costs a lot less than something else, and is actually better...i'd agree with the previous poster, and say to wait it out until you actually hear of these things in use, or get to play with one yourself. when i had my saffire, everyone seemed to want one, but noone seemed to have one, so it was hard to get any info at all as to how good it actually was. the few comparisons that i could find were with much lower end gear, so it was hard to tell, really. i'd say for the $, it was pretty good. definitely better than the mbox. but did it stand up to the more expensive traveler? for me, not really.
the thing i probably like the most about the traveler is that it fits perfectly beneath my 15" powerbook...it's come in handy for records with limited table space (business meetings, etc), and has worked without a hitch.
the focusrite liquidchannel looks very interesting indeed, though.

kell