Hi all- I was curious to hear people's opinions about how LAWP was working with the MOTU 2408 MKII cards. I'm very interested in upgrading from my Audiowerk 8 and was hoping this new card would both help me lower latency and also allow for graceful simultaneous recording of multiple tracks of audio. While browsing the digest today though I came accross a link to an evaluation of "Logic Audio DSP Performance." In regard to the MOTU 2408 it is said: "The MOTU 2408/1224 (according to my own experience) doesn't seem to perform too well on Logic Windows: it won't playback reliably with buffer settings lower than 1024 and the ASIO drivers have a relatively high CPU load: so when you enable many I/O channels, the overall system performance "sinks" quite niticeably. A quite annoying thing on PCs seems to be that a certain DSP load at a given buffersize is never really 100% "safe": I have experienced with the MOTU 2408mkII things like getting "just" 2 or 3 crackles in 1 hour of recording with the buffers at 1024 (which by any short-time test seem to be very reliable). This might be just an issue with the MOTU system, I will add more info once I have tested the RME Hammerfall thoroughly." http://www.digitalnaturalsound.com/logic_dsp/notes.htm Does anyone concur with this? Through my reading I get the impression that the 2408 interfaces with LAWP by way of ASIO drivers and that this is the only way to go. Are people experiencing less than great performance? Has anyone "upgraded" from an AW8 to the MOTU 2408 MKII and been disappointed? Are folks on the PC platform happy with this cards performance? My setup includes: Asus P2BS, 600Mhz PIII (512k Cache), 256RAM, 6 Gig Western Digital UDMA system drive, 9.1 gig SCSI Seagate Baracuda for Audio Only, Diamond Monster Fusion 16meg Video Card, LAWP 4.61, Win98 SE (clean audio-only install). I've searched the web exhaustively and have found little on this subject so your input is greatly appreciated. Many thanks- Lee

Hi Lee, We switched from AW 8 to a Motu 2408 MkII last year. This was before LAWP 4.5. Initially we were disappointed because it just would work. With the arrival of 4.5 all problems were solved. Can't say that we ever regretted it. It's great value for money - we couldn't afford Pro Tools - and we were on PC anyway, so the 2408 seemed the best option. It works so flawlessly here that I sometimes forget it's there. It also doesn't seem to be too taxing on the system. I frequently do productions in excess of 24 tracks using heaps of plugins (occasionally requiring bounces) and I'm happy. I also haven't felt the need to upgrade my PC for an incredible period of time - nearly two years. My system is a modest P III 450 with 256 MB RAM on a ASUS P2BF board. I've abandoned SCSI HD for recording, and I now use one of the recent 7200 rpm IBM HDs. I'm sure that with your setup you will get a lot of mileage out of a 2408. Cheers, Recky Lee Howard wrote: > Hi all- > > I was curious to hear people's opinions about how LAWP was working with the MOTU 2408 MKII cards. I'm very interested in upgrading from my Audiowerk 8 and was hoping this new card would both help me lower latency and also allow for graceful simultaneous recording of multiple tracks of audio. > > While browsing the digest today though I came accross a link to an evaluation of "Logic Audio DSP Performance." In regard to the MOTU 2408 it is said: > > "The MOTU 2408/1224 (according to my own experience) doesn't seem to perform too well on Logic Windows: it won't playback reliably with buffer settings lower than 1024 and the ASIO drivers have a relatively high CPU load: so when you enable many I/O channels, the overall system performance "sinks" quite niticeably. > A quite annoying thing on PCs seems to be that a certain DSP load at a given buffersize is never really 100% "safe": I have experienced with the MOTU 2408mkII things like getting "just" 2 or 3 crackles in 1 hour of recording with the buffers at 1024 (which by any short-time test seem to be very reliable). This might be just an issue with the MOTU system, I will add more info once I have tested the RME Hammerfall thoroughly." > http://www.digitalnaturalsound.com/logic_dsp/notes.htm > > Does anyone concur with this? Through my reading I get the impression that the 2408 interfaces with LAWP by way of ASIO drivers and that this is the only way to go. Are people experiencing less than great performance? Has anyone "upgraded" from an AW8 to the MOTU 2408 MKII and been disappointed? Are folks on the PC platform happy with this cards performance? > > My setup includes: Asus P2BS, 600Mhz PIII (512k Cache), 256RAM, 6 Gig Western Digital UDMA system drive, 9.1 gig SCSI Seagate Baracuda for Audio Only, Diamond Monster Fusion 16meg Video Card, LAWP 4.61, Win98 SE (clean audio-only install). > > I've searched the web exhaustively and have found little on this subject so your input is greatly appreciated. > > Many thanks- > > Lee > >