we are now equipped with MOTU896MK3
Previously, the unit was known as the 896HD. It is the most expensive of all of MOTU's Firewire interfaces, weighing in at USD 999 street.
The Mic preamp itself seems different from the preamps on my older presonus FP10. There is more gain on the 896 preamps. We made our first try on last Wednesday recording session. My first thought: Wow! Headroom! Yet as I turn up the gain past 6, I can hear the noise floor rush up, with a huge wash of hiss with artifacts of ground hum, we now need to watch the level of inputs closely to avoid it screwed.
But I can now tweak with SM57 with the volume knob turn to 3, i.e. these preamps will deliver with your dynamic and well as condenser mics. Its got a sweet coloration that interacts well with our My Mics TST and AKG C3000B.
The cue mix is handy.It provide Reverb during recording but not getting it recorded, I used to use software reverb during recording for a better singing experience, but now i could remove the real time plug in, same some memory resources and let the hardware do the jobs.
I am most impressed to the converter that give me much higher clarity compare to FP10.
It is chained to Presonus FP10 via Asio4all that give us the ability to record up to 16 XLR tracks simultaneously. But it is way too heavy!! It drove my PC to the corner and I guess we got no choice to upgrade the PC to i7 Sandy Bridge 2600 3.4GHz with 8 gigs DDR3 RAM in a very nearby future.^^
