MOTUnation.com

My 896HD unit was meant to serve it's live purpose last night, monitoring and doing its thing. At the last minute before the show began, a friend decided he wanted to record the show and proceeded to connect the thing to his Macbook. Low and behold, he accidentally plugged the firwire cable UPSIDE DOWN into the port on the back of the 896HD. It KILLED it! Now upon plugging it in rightside up to a computer- the 896 freezes. and without the computer it won't produce sound out of the headphone out, nor the mains.

This is unacceptable. What a shite, cheap plug on they put on the back of the unit, that you can break it by plugging it in wrong! USB ports, for instance, are made in such a way that you CAN'T plug it in backwards, thus this kind of thing won't happen unless you foolishly FORCE it in. On the macbook itself, the firwire port is build with hard plastic to define the shape of the plug, so you can't plug it in wrong.

On this unit you don't have to push any harder to plug it in wrong than to plug it in right- and the wrong way will destroy it!

I've a a pile if issues with this unit through the three years i've owned it... and not only am I gonna sell it once it's fixed- i'm never going motu agian. =Z

I agree that the device shouldn't die when anything is plugged in the wrong direction. But even if it did, the good thing would be to have the circuit which separates the rest of the device and to have a changeable interface "card" inside the device itself. That way, if anything is connected wrong and killed, you should be able to change it rapidly.
A lot of "bigger" names than MOTU doesn't do this, for example, Sony's DVCAM DSR 45 player/recorder has the same issue - pretty "fragile" firewire port which doesn't even have to be wrongly connected to die (it dies when the unit is connected/disconnected while ON). The problem is that firewire chip is integrated on the rest of the board, so you have to send the whole unit for repair, and you don't wanna know how much it costs in the end.
The cheap solution would be to just to change the interface card, but I guess that way their profits would go down... It just isn't worth the hassle, so one reason more to go with something else.

so if we went with another audio card; what is it? Is the Presonus FirePod 10 a good choice? =Z

Zeb81 wrote:so if we went with another audio card; what is it? Is the Presonus FirePod 10 a good choice? =Z

To be honest, I don't know. My next setup will probably be PCI (express) card with AES I/O (at least 4x2 channels) and A/D and D/A converters completely separated from computer. I'm not falling anymore to this firewire/USB business, I want my studio equipment to be just that - studio equipment - and not computer equipment. That way, when I upgrade my computer, I will have to change (maybe) only AES interface card, but my preamps and converters stay completely separated (unlike 896 which has all in one).

mmmmmmmmm... i like where your going with that. B-)