AW: Live Looping Interface

["Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill" <rs@moinlabs.de>]

> In that case Rainer, i think i'm going with the Firebox you originally
talked about. Do you prefere this instead of the FW410 from 
> M-Audio? 

I'm not qualified to say that; I never used the FW410. I have a lot of
experience with the Firebox and can say a lot of positive things, and a few
let-downs, two of which are:
        * must sync to external S/PDIF when using one
        * no SPS supplied (e.g. you need a different power supply when 
going
to a country with different voltage)

I was, however, surprised, that the Firebox earns really good props even on
those super-spiffy forums like recording.org and gearslutz.com.

One thing I don't like about the FW410 is that it doesn't have analogue
level control for the main outs (which may or may not disturb you - when at
a live venue, I usually prefer going into the amplifier directly instead of
running through a mixer first. Some of those power amps don't have level
control. When controlling levels with a digital control, you loose 
converter
resolution etc. etc.). Another thing is it doesn't have balanced outputs
(don't like that for mostly the same reason). Both of these were the reason
I didn't look at the FW410 in the first place.

Feature-wise, let me try to do a comparison (in case of the FW410, just
coming from the specs):

                FW410                   Firebox
Mic/Inst In     2                       2
Line in 2                       2
Line Out        8                       6
bal. in                         X
bal. out                                X
192kHz out      X
SPDIF coax      X                       X
SPDIF opt       X
headph out      2                       1
max. gain       66                      72
MIDI I/O        1                       1

You be the judge of that - for your typical live application, there's most
probably nothing that rules out one of those (safe perhaps for the balanced
outputs).

Summarizingly, I can say I can recommend the Firebox for what it's for: as 
a
small audio interface for live or mobile project studio applications, with
some professional features.

Hope that helps,

        Rainer