Motu 2408mk3 PCIe
I have been a fan of Motu interfaces since I first ventured into the land of “owning/operating a home studio”. I rocked a first gen Motu 828 firewire interface for probably 4 years and it still worked when I got rid of it! The general thought when it comes to Motu is that they make hardware/software for Mac users right? Well not entirely, when I purchased my 828 it came with cuemix software that only worked on Mac’s! So that left me one option when it came to monitoring; and that was to use an external hardware mixer, in my case a Mackie CFX20. That is not a huge deal, but mixers take up space, and add more cables and buttons to the mix. I used a patch bay to split incoming signals, one going to the mixer for monitoring, and the other going to the 828 for recording. Then I took the 2-channel output from the 828 back into a stereo channel on the mixer for playback. Pain in the ass right? Yeah!
When it came to building my new audio only PC (some day I will post about the build) I wanted to get away from firewire. Why? Well ever since service pack 2 came out for XP, I was having problems with firewire through put. I am not going into details about SP2, but it did limit firewire through put, and Microsoft knew about it! Once again Microsoft botches an upgrade, with some new security feature. Anyways, sorry for the Winblows tangent, Motu/Microsoft supposedly had fixes for this, but even after they were applied my 828 was still hit or miss. I was sometimes required to cycle the 828 on and off before windows would recognize it. Granted SP2 might not be entirely to blame, but that is when I first started noticing it.
I decided I was going PCI and that was it, so to the local Guitar Center to se what they had…… not to my surprise they had nothing in the area of a PCI audio interface. I decided to research some different brands before I made a quick decision and purchase. I looked at a few different interfaces from RME and a couple other manf. RME has great interfaces, but my loyalty was still with Motu. So sweetwater.com here we go, a couple clicks and my new 2408mk3 core system was on its way! I decided to go with the PCIe model, because my new PC’s motherboard had two PCIe slots……. genius right? You have to get the core system (unless you already had a PCI-424 card) because not only does it include the breakout box, but the PCIe card as well.
The card installs just like any other card does in a computer, then all you have to do is hook up the breakout box to the card with the supplied cable (which looks just like a firewire cable…hmmmm). I then made all of my connections to the back of the interface; Keyboard, PODxt, and my V-Drum outputs all got stereo inputs on the back of the 2408. The two remaining stereo inputs were reserved for my DBX hardware compressor. The rest of my inputs would be handled digitally, through the three ADAT lightpipe inputs. Keep in mind though that the 2408 handles its inputs in banks of 8’s, and has a total of 3 banks. If you are using analog inputs as your first bank, then you must use the second bank for your optical inputs. This might seem obvious, but I thought the digital inputs would be separate from the analog inputs, and apparently I was wrong. Only one can be assigned to a bank at one time. With my second bank of inputs I choose to use Adat digital input bank b, which means I needed to connect any adat lightpipe equipped equipment to the adat input “b”….. pretty simple. In this case I plugged used the output of my Octopre, because I have the optional digital output card installed in the Octopre. I also have an Alesis AI-3 and an old Blackface Adat recorder that I could connect to the adat input bank “c” on the 2408 if I needed more inputs.
With all my connections made, I fired up my computer and the interface. I have failed to mention that during this install, I have completely removed the mixer and patchbay from my signal chain. With the Motu cuemix software I can re-route all of my signals to any output and monitor with zero latency, so in theory I do not need the hardware mixer anymore. I use a Focusrite Octopre for mic preamplication so I do not need the pres in the mixer. Using the 2408 settings program that is installed when you install the drivers, you set up the 2408 based on your current hardware and software set up. I then opened up the Cuemix software, which is also included on the driver CD from Motu and set up my inputs and outputs routing. In my case I have my main mix (channels 1-2) going to input one of my headphone amp, then I set up another monitoring mix that outputs on channels 3-4, which is sent to my second input of my headphone amp. This will allow me to have two different mix possibilities at the switch of a button on my headphone amp. The one thing I could not figure out, is how to rename the inputs in Cuemix; for example I have two small condensers set up for acoustic guitar recording on input ADAT bank B channels 5-6, it would be nice if I could just rename this “acoustic guitar” so I don’t have to try and figure out where I have everything plugged in all the time.
I started off using the WDM drivers, but was having some latency issues while driving external midi devices and then recording their analog output, so I switched to ASIO and things seemed to get a little better. The 2408 offers 96k and 24bit capabilities, but because I had already started most of my projects at 44k 16bit I left it set at the lower settings.
It is hard for me to comment on the AD converts in the 2408 because I totally switched setups including a sequencer upgrade and new pre-amps all at the same time, but I can tell you my recordings do sound much better and I haven’t had one ounce of trouble with the interface. The 2408 has about as many options as anyone would need, and for a home setup if fits my needs perfectly.