View and vote on the article here: MOTU 828mkII Audio Hardware
MOTU 828mkII Audio Hardware| Category | | | Summary | | The equipment I am reviewing is manufactured by a company called ?Mark of the Unicorn'. They later shortened the name to MOTU. There website is www.motu.com. The piece I am reviewing is called the MOTU 828mkII < http://www.motu.com/english/motuaudio/82 |
| | Body | After purchasing this unit I could not wait to get it home and open it so I could try it out. So I ripped open the box and didn't even bother planting it in my rack. I immediately hooked it up via my firewire card on my windows 2000 pc. I was quite bored with the fact that I could not get my firewire ports to work. So I hit the internet to purchase a new one for my laptop which is much more powerful anyway. At least now I could have a mobile studio.
A little over 20 USD and a week later I got to fire up the MOTU. I spent about 3 hours (without the manual) trying to get it to work with Cubase SX < http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/music_production/cubase_sx_20/index.php?sid=0 > I had to go leave to do a live recording gig that I had booked a few weeks earlier. Yikes! I don't even know how to use the equipment and I have to go use it in an hour! I loaded my gear anyway and headed to the venue, as unprepared as I could get.
Upon arriving to the event where Diane Ward < www.dianeward.com > was playing I unloaded my gear at the curb and set it up to record the show. I have a small setup that consists of my laptop, two studio monitors, a case full of different kinds of microphones and a two unit rack that contains the MOTU 828 and a stereo compressor, just in case the signal levels get too high.
Still not properly setup the bass player, Debbie Duke ? being a techno-geek like myself -, comes over to check out the setup. She asks me a few intelligent questions and I vented my frustrations about not being able to get signal to Cubase. She asked a few more intelligent questions and after about fifteen minutes we had it recording! Uber-yay!
For microphones I had set up two Sure condenser mic's to get the best ambient recording. The band started to play and I started to record. The signals started to show in Cubase and I knew my hard drive was filling up with audio. I was wondering how long it would be before my disk was full. Fortunately, Cubase shows how much actual record time there is based on disk space. It said something close to eleven hours. I was relieved. Thru my monitors I could hear what was going to disk. It sounded good. The band finished playing the set and I stopped recording. (To hear the actual recording go to www.scottlindsey.net/diane.php ). I put up the third set which is about twenty minutes of audio.
At the start of the second set I started recording and noticed that it did not start recording at the end of the first set like I expected. It was recording over the first set. In a fit of keystrokes and mouse moves I had duplicated the tracks and started two more tracks recording. It was almost a disaster. Then I did something stupid. I started tweaking. I noticed a particular plug-in and loaded it. As soon as it loaded Cubase crashed and then 450 watts of signal feedback blasted me in the face. I almost had a heart attack. The band and everyone in the audience looked at me. I spastically reached down and hit the power on the strip and off went the feedback and the lights to my gear. The laptop remained on because of the battery. Upon restarting Cubase I noticed that I had lost about twenty minutes of the second set. I started the recording process again and accidentally started recording over the first set again. Damn. So I created more tracks and started recording again. Then I accidentally deleted one side or the first set because I thought it was a duplicate track. I was wrong. It was gone because, just to be safe, I saved it after I deleted it. Ugh. At least I got the last few songs of the second set.
The third set was recorded perfectly. I created the tracks before they started playing. I hit record and left my hands away from the laptop. In fact, I got a beer to keep my hands from roaming. It was perfect. The band was great. The gear was humming nicely. The beer was good. The monitors sounded great. The hard drive was far from full. I was happy. I had achieved recording nirvana. It took me almost the entire show and a few mistakes that cost me one side of the first set, two-thirds of the second set and money for a sandwich and a few adult beverages, but I have a recording that sounds great. At least the band knew I was doing this for free and to learn my gear. They were very gracious and expressed how ?cool it was' that I wanted to record their show. That was incredible. I was honored. During the show, Diane even mentioned to the audience that they were being recorded by their good friend, Scott, and pointed me out.
So after the show I packed up and went home eager to hear what it sounded like, mistakes and all. After setting up in my dining room I hit play. I was almost thrown to the floor with how great is sounded! I don't know what I expected. I just know that it sounded better than I thought it would, considering the circumstances. I wanted to do a serious recording using my mixing board and a full set of microphones. But instead I used two ambient mic's into the MOTU and recording to my hard drive thru Cubase.
The audio is crystal clear. I heard no distortion. I recorded the audio at 44.1 kHz in stereo. The entire portions of the show that I captured filled about 1 GB of hard disk. I can say that using the MOTU 828mkII was the best, overall, recording experience of my life. Just to qualify that statement a little, I have been involved with professional audio and recording for close to fifteen years. The equipment is minimal. The total price for investment for the gear I used on this recording is close to $3,000 USD, including the laptop; the MOTU costs around $800 USD but is well worth it. The potential that this mobile recording station has is incredible. Please go listen to the actual audio recorded. It's not perfect but it is very good. That's a slight sample of what this MOTU 828mkII can do, even by an unprepared recording engineer.
Author: r00tpig |
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: Prothis)
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