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ericthegreat « Nice and easy »
Published on 09/25/11 at 22:05I've had mine a little over a month now. I love it! I had read some reviews elsewhere complaining about latency issues and FW problems, etc. I put a Lacie FW400 card in my old Dell Dimension 3000 w a 2.80 GHz Pentium 4 and t works seamlessly, although being dingle core, the FW interface eats up more CPU than I would like. But that is no problem because it is so versatile as a mixer I just use it as an 8 channel ADAT expansion to my E-Mu 1212M card which gives me two more analog inputs with Pro Tools 190 HD converters. And that still leaves me 2 S/DIF channels.
UTILIZATION
I can run all that at 48K all day plus I have 2 channel direct zero latency monitoring off the 1212M and two different zero latency headphone monitor channels and a third monitor output channel giving me a total of 4 different monitor mixes as well as a variety of ways to mix them. And I can use the E-Mu-s 32 bit on board effects on all channels independently as inserts if I want to add saturation, color, tube simulation, etc., as well as really nice digital compression.
GETTING STARTED
Getting started was easy!
OVERALL OPINION
Overall, its Clean, pristine, and with tons of dead quiet headroom! I went through two TrakMaster Pro's that had horrible noise issues above 6 on the gain control. I replaced them with a Studio Projects VTB1(which is actually also an exceptionally clean and useful pre amp for the money) that was much better. But the pre amps in the Pro 49 are what one expects from Focusrite. They don not color the sound they way a Never or other vintage type pres do, and they don't add tube harmonics. But what they do is give you a clean, very musical, very accurate transmission of whatever you plug in it. You can get all kinds incredibly realistic, relatively inexpensive (and even free) plug-ins to give you all the warmth and color you desire as well as compression, etc. (the included Focusrite FX bundle is actually pretty good...), or run it back out and through an analogue source after you have recorded the dry signal. Either way, you won't be disappointed! It has the quality and versatility of interfaces costing far more and is a steal relative to the OctoPre MK II w/o compression.
UTILIZATION
I can run all that at 48K all day plus I have 2 channel direct zero latency monitoring off the 1212M and two different zero latency headphone monitor channels and a third monitor output channel giving me a total of 4 different monitor mixes as well as a variety of ways to mix them. And I can use the E-Mu-s 32 bit on board effects on all channels independently as inserts if I want to add saturation, color, tube simulation, etc., as well as really nice digital compression.
GETTING STARTED
Getting started was easy!
OVERALL OPINION
Overall, its Clean, pristine, and with tons of dead quiet headroom! I went through two TrakMaster Pro's that had horrible noise issues above 6 on the gain control. I replaced them with a Studio Projects VTB1(which is actually also an exceptionally clean and useful pre amp for the money) that was much better. But the pre amps in the Pro 49 are what one expects from Focusrite. They don not color the sound they way a Never or other vintage type pres do, and they don't add tube harmonics. But what they do is give you a clean, very musical, very accurate transmission of whatever you plug in it. You can get all kinds incredibly realistic, relatively inexpensive (and even free) plug-ins to give you all the warmth and color you desire as well as compression, etc. (the included Focusrite FX bundle is actually pretty good...), or run it back out and through an analogue source after you have recorded the dry signal. Either way, you won't be disappointed! It has the quality and versatility of interfaces costing far more and is a steal relative to the OctoPre MK II w/o compression.