Comments

There are 25 kickass comments ~ what do you think?

1. That would be a hot little device if it weren’t for this little blurb on the new mAudio site: “96kHz and 18 x 18 I/O maximum with Pro Tools M-Powered.”

   Digi really needs to slack the restrictions of it’s “lesser” products. It’s getting to be ridiculous.

   By spkguitar ~ January 17, 2008 kl 7:28 pm

2. Yes .I agree. Pro Tools doesn’t come out as very good in this case. The least one expects from the software is that it can take advantage of the hardware.

   By stiff ~ January 18, 2008 kl 4:26 am

3. What!
   This is still better than a 002 so I’m going to upgrade. Or is it crossgrade in this situation?

   By Jon ~ January 21, 2008 kl 11:58 am

4. If this is only available for M-Powered then it doesn’t look good. If it works with LE then that’s a really good thing.

   It is not an upgrade from the 002. It’s an add-on so you can add 8 more mic preamps to the existing 4 that are on the 002 by using the ADAT Lightpipe connection.

   Presonus, Behringer, and Focusrite have similiar products.

   By dougied ~ January 22, 2008 kl 8:46 pm

5. It won’t work with LE.

   By stiff ~ January 23, 2008 kl 9:07 am

6. If an Octopre works with an 002 via Lightpipe…why wouldn’t the 2626 work with 002 via Lightpipe? How can Digidesign disable this device from working on LE?

   By markus44uk ~ January 25, 2008 kl 1:12 pm

7. I can’t wait this baby to come out!PLEASE,WHOEVER HEARS HOW THE PREAMPS SOUND,LET ME KNOW!

   By Matija ~ January 27, 2008 kl 4:35 pm

8. dougied: “It is not an upgrade from the 002. It’s an add-on so you can add 8 more mic preamps to the existing 4 that are on the 002 by using the ADAT Lightpipe connection.”

   I disagree, replacing the 002r with this, would give me 8 total preamps, 2 of them DIs, and an take up half the space.
   It is an audio interface, not just mic pre with ADAT out.
   I see it as an upgrade.

   By Jon ~ January 27, 2008 kl 8:41 pm

9. With this product, you can connect it via ligthpipe to a 003 or whatever you want, and use LE or HD or whatever, but when using it direct to your computer with FireWire, the only pro tools software it will work with is M-Powered, unfortunately

   By dale ~ February 7, 2008 kl 4:23 pm

10. It does NOT offers something amazing! It is being limited by software restrictions… I/O limitation, samplig rate limitation… will stay with the 003R…

    By JB ~ March 3, 2008 kl 3:20 pm

11. What I want to know is: can you hook two or three of these bad boys together (like the presonus firepod) and get more inputs for recording drums and the like. If you can, then why would anybody buy an LE interface? Funnily enough, this thing has more preamps right out of the box than any existing LE hardware. LOL! This reminds of when they released the 32 channel version of LE for XP before they made 32 channels available for Mac users. Also, can you take full advantage of the higher sampling rates without losing inputs.

    Also, lets not kid ourselves. Pro-tools M-powered is almost exactly the same thing as Pro tools LE (and sessions are cross-compatible with either). With a few exceptions like the DV toolkit.

    By Chris ~ March 5, 2008 kl 12:48 am

12. You can use one of these as your *main* interface, then hook another one up as an add on via adat lightpipe for a total of 16 mic pres and use the SPDIF inputs simultaneously for an additional 2 inputs for a grand total of 18, with Pro Tools M-Powered. It may be possible to do the maximum of 26, using M-Powered 7.3 for Mac OSX, since they made an error in the code, so you can use 32 ins and outs. Works with a ProFire LightBridge, and may work with this one as well. I’ll be pre-ordering 2 of these ProFire 2626 units. : )=

    By Marc ~ March 5, 2008 kl 1:51 am

13. This unit is apparently in stock now at online dealers. Please, somebody post of a review of it soon, and let us know if it’s really a step up, or just another no-quality-control junk box from M-Audio.

    By Leigh ~ March 21, 2008 kl 1:42 pm

14. I see this as a modest upgrade to the 003R for two reasons: better clock plus onboard routing & mixing. I use the 003R aux input a lot for monitoring the PC output when Pro Tools is not running, and would like the convenience of monitoring a few other analog sources without having to patch or add an outboard switcher. 1U is pretty nice too in a small setup. Sky

    By Sky ~ April 17, 2008 kl 4:34 pm

15. Okay lightpipe allows you to add extra preamps that are ADAT lightpipe compatable ie the focusrite or M-Audio own Octane. If you wanted to add more preamps it would be far more cost effective to buy 2x an Octane rather than a whole new Profire, in addition I am not even sure whether two would work together very well, people have been trying to run two Motu units together for years, and there are always more problems than running one soundcard and a seperate preamps for extra preamps.
    In terms of whether this can act like a light pip preamp that depends on the routing not all 8 preamps soundcards can do this, in fact until now the only one with this capability is the Motu 8pre which can work as soundcard or 8 channel preamp.
    It still remains that it would be better to buy an Octane or Octepre rather than one of these to complement a LE system.
    Personally I think that the Profire is an awesome bit of kit and its going to be my next soundcard as I wish to have ProTool for compatability with collaborators. I would consider swapping to PT completely if they enabled the 24 track simultaneous recording which works in other DAWs, and also added the latency correction facility which is an incredibly frustrating. I understand why, they are trying to force people to the HD solution, but I will never pay that money for the solution period, but I would go Protools soley if M-Powered had those two features, so instead of gaining an HD customer they are losing an M-Powered one.

    By Gordon ~ April 29, 2008 kl 10:53 am

16. Whats so bad about Pro Tools M-powered. Its nearly identical to LE, works with all the same plugins as LE, works with way more interfaces, and has add on capibilities such as the music production toolkit.

    Whats so bad about Mpowred?

    By Blake Gaston ~ May 10, 2008 kl 9:00 pm

17. The two features Gordon complained about are features lacking in both M-Powered and LE. The reason he mentioned M-Powered is because it is relating to the Profire 2626.
    It has most of the same features as LE, or you can see it as an even more limited version of PT than LE. Music production toolkit works with M-Powered but not DV Toolkit, thats a big drawback for some users. No MacDrive with M-Powered, LE has it included. That can limit compatibility when sharing files.

    By ~Jon~ @ Audiogeekzine ~ May 11, 2008 kl 2:07 pm

18. Without knowing it beforehand it turned out I worked with one off these today. I like these preamps better than the 002 or Mbox 2. Beautiful unit this is…Switching between Nuendo and PT M-powered I mixed a live performance of 40 minutes. Comping the original Nuendo session and mixing in M-Powered. Which also had the SSL duende running on a separate firewire card. WOW! that’s something I love! 32 channels of SSL EQ and compressing. There is something spectacular about running the same EQ and comp on all the channels. Only other 3 plug ins used are the PSP Vintagewarmer (on drumgroup), Altiverb (using the EMT plate impulse) and Waves L2 on the Master.

    By J~P ~ May 14, 2008 kl 1:02 pm

19. That’s my type of mix (besides the fact I’m experimenting with minimizing EQ at the moment).

    Any other impressions of it?

    By stiff ~ May 15, 2008 kl 12:03 pm

20. WOW, I got this baby in yesterday. Hooked it up and …
    Well you know “wow”. I do how ever agree with you guys on PT m powered. It should be if the hardware can handle 24bit 192khz then the software should aswell. Plus its limited to m audio products so what are they going to loose? nothing. Evan cakewalk’s sonar gose all the way.
    anywho, The Profire 2626 is a verry nice unit im using it along with my presonas firepods and to answer the question on linking the two to gether, well it dose not work that way. but over all still better sounding than the 002 or Mbox 2.

    By Yuma Studio ~ May 23, 2008 kl 11:30 am

21. Thanks for that Yuma Studio!

    Anyone done a preamp shootout yet?

    By stiff ~ May 24, 2008 kl 3:18 am

22. I upgraded to this unit from the 001 rack (about time). I now use this the 2626 as my soundcard for general music listening as well. First, i have to say that even itunes sounded noticeably better. And i know that the pre amps sound ‘better’ than the ones on the 001, although i have no comparison to offer to any of you. I did an A/B test with an old session and the pres sound much better. I dont want to throw out a bunch of words that dont mean anything to anyone, like ‘tight’ or ‘airy’ so im just going to leave it at ‘better’. However, the preamp pots have almost all their gain in the last few degrees of the turn. Turn it all the way to three o’clock and you get about +20db, and then turn it all the way till 4 o’clock, and bam! you get 30more db. that will be kinda annoying, but its a solid unit other than that.

    By mike ~ June 1, 2008 kl 11:54 pm

23. ya stiff I found out the same boost on mine, but still over all verry nice sounding.

    By Yuma Studio ~ June 11, 2008 kl 5:59 pm

24. M-Powered is a great version of PT. But keep in mind that is very specifically targeted at music production. Thus explaning it’s compatability with the Music Production Toolkit and no the DV Toolkit. It would be nice if you got both, but this is Digidesign making judgements about the use of it’s software and its users, right or wrong.

    I.E. if you’re a small project studio, it’s likely that you’re not doing Post Audio and are focusing primarily on band recording. therefore, why the heck would you need the DV toolkit. And if you do need it, then why the heck aren’t you upgrading to HD.
    And when it comes to sampling rates, if you have the kind of clientelle that
    A) know the difference between 16/44.1 and 24/192
    or
    B) can hear the difference, then you should probably have the money to buy an HD system. Or else you’re severely underselling yourself and your services.

    As for the Profire, I haven’t had the pleasure of checking one out yet. But the immediate benefit to it, if what i read is accurate, would be utilizing the lightpipe and the Spdif simultaneously. Something you just can’t do with other digidesign pre’s like the Profire lightbridge or the ProjectMix (or the 003, correct me if i’m wrong on that)
    And the ability to bypass the analog inputs altogether. Meaning you could use both lightpipe in’s for 16 channels of Digital I/O from two other devices and then grab your SPDIF as well. Thats a pretty fat perk for a project/home studio user in my opinion.

    I have an Octane myself as my second set of pre’s and I think they sound great. Very Warm. So the fact they’ve used the same technology on the 2626 pre’s means you have a solid little box, that can travel without a lot of space, for $$peanuts$$.

    While I don’t agree with Digidesigns practices of limiting it’s software I can see why they do it. It is afterall, a money thing and they are a business. And they know if you start making the kind of money, you’re probably gonna upgrade.
    I don’t however understand the track limitations. 18?? thats a stupid #. at least go it 8’s people…..come on now!

    So I am curious about the Lightpipt/SPDIF. Has anyone used these in tandem for the full 18? any issues??

    By knuckle ~ June 22, 2008 kl 2:28 pm

25. So I found that Mixcraft will run at 16, 24, and 32 bit up to 192khz. But the thing I like about mixcraft is that it will let me use my 3 presonas firepod 10’s with my m audio 2626 profire together. WOW thats alot of inputs. So give it a try, its free for 10 days. But if you waunt to buy it, it’s under 80 bucks. I still use pro tools for 90% of the job.

    By Yuma studio ~ June 25, 2008 kl 11:28 am