Fireface 400 or Motu Ultralite?

jesso · Post by **jesso** » Mon May 05, 2008 2:14 pm

Have never used an ultralight, but have been using ff400 for over a year now. Very flexible routing wise, and sound quality is noticeably sharper than my firebox, which still sounds pretty good.
I have a few friends that also use them, and although they have never had any trouble with build quality, the outputs on mine have been dodgy for a while now... recently they have gotten so bad that im gonna have to send it back to rme to be fixed, it feels like a loose connection somewhere.
Saying that, it has been gigged a lot, and its been chucked about in a laptop bag a lot too.
The firebox seems much more rugged to me, and is now my interface of choice for gigging (you should check it out if it has enough outputs on it for you) it also has a headphone level knob.
Ive never had any stability problems with the RME. Its solid for me on my macbook, so is the firebox.

ze2be · Post by **ze2be** » Mon May 05, 2008 2:15 pm

landrvr1 wrote:
flippo2007 wrote:Hi!

I returned my Ultralite becuase it led to massive problems while using Live...

MAssive Glitches total breakdowns, extremly loud noise, crazy in- and outputs...

I´ve got a Focusrite Saffire now and im happy!

Greetz, FLip

Heh, uh oh. I was thinking of trading up my Focusrite Saffire for the Ultralite. I love the Saffire, but I'm a bit miffed that I've got to set my buffer so high - which seems to be a fairly common problem. More importantly, the Ultralite, with it's higher pricetag of course, has plenty of inputs.

Funny, but I've yet to read a bad review of the Ultralite. Wondering why you just didn't get a different unit?

Aquatec also had his one breaking down!

flippo2007 · Post by **flippo2007** » Mon May 05, 2008 2:35 pm

Hiho!

I´ve set my Saffire buffer to 280 (i took more than needed...) and it works perfectly... it has about 9 msec latency and thats fine for me... i already recorded voice over a track and my singer was happy with the monitoring and the latency.

The reason why i did´nt change my ultralite to another unit, is that i really lost my faith in Motu with all the problems that occured...

*) the noise that came all over sudden was so loud, that it almos blew my ears three times in 5 days.

*) The Motu Tech Support did´nt know what to do...

*) Even if i set all outputs to the Ultralite in OSX´s settings...some still came out of my internal IMAC-Speakers and others out of the Ultralite...annoying!

If i took another one, the only thing i could do was waiting for the next problem to come...even if it never came...to much stress, if i wanna use the thingy in the liveroom or on stage without fear....

Im happy with my Saffire now - it has enough inputs for me and sounds good. So everything works out for me..

Greetz, Flip

landrvr1 · Post by **landrvr1** » Mon May 05, 2008 2:58 pm

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, I'm quite happy with the Saffire as well, but...shit...the Motu just looks so bitchin'. lol

flippo2007 · Post by **flippo2007** » Mon May 05, 2008 3:30 pm

Jup..the Motu´s nice..

But in my case i got the better inerface for €100 less in the end.

Im sure that Motu produces great interfaces...as well als Fucusrite... and after all my last decision was between the Ultralite and the Saffire...after hours of recherche...

So it was´nt hard to decide what to do, when i found out that there´s no chance for a proper working Ultralite within my setup.

Greetz, Flip

mohler · Post by **mohler** » Mon May 05, 2008 4:47 pm

jesso wrote:Have never used an ultralight, but have been using ff400 for over a year now. Very flexible routing wise, and sound quality is noticeably sharper than my firebox, which still sounds pretty good.
I have a few friends that also use them, and although they have never had any trouble with build quality, the outputs on mine have been dodgy for a while now... recently they have gotten so bad that im gonna have to send it back to rme to be fixed, it feels like a loose connection somewhere.
Saying that, it has been gigged a lot, and its been chucked about in a laptop bag a lot too.
The firebox seems much more rugged to me, and is now my interface of choice for gigging (you should check it out if it has enough outputs on it for you) it also has a headphone level knob.
Ive never had any stability problems with the RME. Its solid for me on my macbook, so is the firebox.

Thanks for that ^^^ well all of them actually.

I think there's a buss power problem with the firebox and the MBP, I did look before and I think I came up with that! they do look nice and solid.

It seems a bit 50/50 on reports about each of these. still haven't made up my mid but I'm not in any rush i've a few weeks in the studio before I'm back out on the road.