Thursday, February 11, 2010

firewire audio interfaces

i've been thinking about trying to find a decent, portable firewire audio interface for when i (eventually) start playing shows again. i have my 828mkii, which is great, but it's racked in my desk right now and i just want to have a super-small, lightweight setup. ideally i'm thinking my setup would be something like: laptop, launchpad, nanokontrol, audio interface, period. so the motu kind of doesn't really work for portability, and is overkill anyway. the cheapest small motu's are in the $500-$600 range, which is more than i want to spend. m-audio has some ~$200 joints, but i won't buy anything from m-audio that's mission-critical. i saw that the presonus firebox is pretty cheap now, and i seem to remember hearing good things about it when it came out. all i really care about is that it's small, low-latency, durable, has 2-4 outs, and can have a separate main and headphone mix. it seems like the firebox has all of that covered. anybody know anything about this unit, or have any other suggestions?

5 comments:

  1. I have to agree with the M-Audio comment (being that I have a handful of their gear), it is cheap. It is good for a starter, but not for ninjas.

    I was talking gear with some of the cooler hipster kids i know(they don't have beat boys here, just hipsters with varying levels of Kanye/indy rock/artzy fuck/actually not fuckheads). I recommended that Firebox. It looks solid, no USB, has DI, Mic, and Line ins, and the head phone and master control. I didn't see if it had Phantom Power (which you may not need but I find useful).

    When you going to drop some shows? What you got up your sleeve? I am stuck in purgatory with 4 half done 2 track chop ups and 4 partial ambient soundscapes and some bloopy glitch song on my desktop.

    ReplyDelete
  2. yeah, it seems like a good deal. it has phantom power, but i don't need it. it's probably between this one and the focusrite saffire pro. i don't know when exactly i'm gonna play anywhere. i'm in about the same boat as you as far as amount of material i want to play out. there's a local producers thing that happens around here every now and then that has a bunch of local people playing 30 min sets, and i could probably get that together before too long.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dude, i've been "stuck in purgatory with 4 half done 2 track chop ups and 4 partial ambient soundscapes and some bloopy glitch song on my desktop" for like, the last decade. sometimes i get lucky and manage to push one or two turds through the blockage, but i'm still always constipated. i think it's a white thing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. maybe we should all just be like Joker or one of those other cats that put out everything, even if it's straight garbage and you forget to name the track something other than the generic filename you picked for it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Alex- that pro saffire looks dope, I like that better than presonus, and you will get more street cred from the gear snobs.

    T-dub- i can't shit. I just can't. There are a lot of things I can blame in my life on my race.

    breph-nasty- we could create an place where we could just annonamsouly put tracks, and then do a big compilation release- call is ass goblins, or taint, or something vile and sexual. I got tons of bullshit no one ever has heard.

    ReplyDelete