MOTU 896 or RME Hammerfall Multiface

[baldo]

I'd appreciate opinions about the + & - of these products.

I'm close to a purchase & have narrowed it down to these 2.

Give me the good, the bad & the ugly.

thx

[blacko3788]

If I had to do over again I would go RME I hear it has a better word clock and less jitter than the Motu...depending on which motu also. The 1296 I hear is very good...How about Apogee? How many tracks do you want to record at once? And what mixer are you using if using one at all?

[baldo]

Thx for the response.

I've heard great things about RME & their D/A- A/D converters.

Which MOTU do you use?

I'm curremtly not using a hardware mixer.

I have fire wire and like the idea of the box outside the main DAW.

Are you MAC or PC?

There is alot of info to digest regarding these items.

What is a minimum acceptable SNR ?

[blacko3788]

I have no clue on the snr...I'm inputing the signal into the tascam dm24 digital mixing board then tdif (24 channels ) into MOTU then into Logic. That way I can have total control over the tone and dynamics going into the DAW.

[baldo]

I only need to record a couple tracks @a time @ this point.

I am curious about which MOTU you are using. I don't want to run into clock problems.

What do you mean by jitter?

thx again.

[blacko3788]

I use the MOTU 2408 mkll.....and the Jitter mean...please don't get me for plagerism but here goes....

In a digital recorder or sampler, errors in the timing of sample acquisition due to rapid amplitude changes is called jitter (also known as Sample Offset Uncertainty). Jitter introduces some distortion and phase discrepancy into an audio signal. Higher frequencies are more susceptible to jitter than lower. In most modern gear, use of clocked buffers for digital data streams has minimized the effects of jitter.