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 MOTU 2408 mkII At a Glance   arrowMOTU News(114)   Streaming Video (6)
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arrowReleased: 2000  arrowVersion: 0.00
arrowRated: 7.6/10arrow User reviews: (11)
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arrowSoftware: Win 95/98, Win XP, Mac, OSX,
arrowHardware: PCI
Albert writes:
The MOTU 2408 mkII is a sound card for Mac and PC that has three banks of ADAT and TDIF digital in/out as well as eight analog ins and outs, and SPDIF in/out. The mkII version is different from the original in that the analog in/out has been upgraded to 24bit on balanced TRS connectors.

The 2408 has a rack mount unit that houses the audio in/out and various digital in/out connectors, and is connected to the actual sound card in the computer by a firewire cable. I found this to be quite convenient, as I could rack the audio breakout unit in my rack and just have one cable going across the room to my computer. This is an improvement over my 1212 I/O, where I had to have all the audio and data cabling running across the room. Another nice touch is the headphone jack with seperate volume control, and the dedicated stereo out pair on the back of the unit.

The hardware worked perfectly out of the box and was very easy to set up. Not so with the software! I'm using an almost all MOTU studio here, so I thought setup would be a breeze. The PCI-2408 extensions are a bit fiddly in terms of conflicts with other system extensions. I had terrible crashing problems due to a four way conflict. The problem was with a graphics driver and the driver for my G3 card. Not cool to lose those, but the MOTU stuff is real happy right now. Once I sorted out the conflicts everything got very stable.

The sound is quite nice, clean and natural sounding, probably due to the 24bit converters. I haven't done a torture test yet to see how many tracks I can lay down at once, but the stereo work that I've been doing so far has worked out very well.

Good Points
I think the good points of this unit are the separate rackmount breakout box and firewire setup, along with the ADAT, TDIF, SPDIF and analog in/out capabilities. Sounds good too!
Bad Points
Software is a bit touchy to set up and seems to conflict with other extensions to a greater degree than it should. In its favor, that can be worked around to create a stable environment.
 

 MOTU 2408 mkII Specifications:

Digital IOs:
1xSPDIF in, 2X SPDIF out, 3xADAT, 3x TDIF
Analog IOs:
8 analog 24 bit in/out TRS, L/R master outs
Midi IOs:
none
Other IOs:
Word Clock In/Out
Maximum Resolution:48k/24bit
EQ:
none
Dynamics:
none
FX:
none

 2408 mkII Links


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