Motu 828x Thunderbolt / USB audio interface - a review

So I have taken posession of my new Motu 828x. I wanted to upgrade my trusty Edirol UA101 to something which can be properly plumbed into my home studio, and I take the UA on the road all the time.

I'm not a professional reviewer, but this is a new model of soundcard and one of the few taking advantage of Apple's new Thunderbolt technology. Thunderbolt is taking over as the defacto interface for high end use on Apple kit. It allows six devices to daisy chain, with a full duplex 10Gbps connection to each, which outstrips Firewire 800 (800 Mbps) and USB3 (5Gbps). This means that I hope to have future proofed my studio a while.

True the pro studios are using ethernet these days, but this is a hobby for me, so I won't be going that route any time soon.

So, what do you get with one of these things? Well, as well as two combi inputs on the front for easy access when using guitars and so on you get 8 balanced TRS ins and outs, ADAT, SPDIF and MIDI. I probably forgot something, but the main thing that you might think is missing is the XLR Mic inputs - it has only the two combi inputs. But that's perfect for me as I'm going to use my Focusrite Octopre with this, so I have that covered. This means they've spent on the money on internal quality, and things like an effects unit, rather than Mic preamps.

In the box you get the unit itself, with ears for attaching to a rack, the power cable of course, a USB cable (bit of a shame - have to get the Thunderbolt cable for yourself) and the drivers. You also get AudioDesk software, which I'll review separately if it's any good. I use Logic, so not sure what I'll use that for.

 And here it is installed above the Octopre in my desk rack. For the nostalgiac that's a JV-1080 underneat the Octopre. I've wired it to have 4 of the inputs from my Octopre, as I never use more than 4 at a time anyway, with the other four from my two modules - the JV and an aging TG300 which, to be fair, I don't use often, but it's a quick way of getting Sibelius to sound decent.

My first barrier is that the drivers were shipped on CD, but fortunately I have an external Blu-Ray player so I can get it installed.

As seems common for sound devices, even on a mac, a restart seems necessary (I wonder if it actually is...) After a reboot and checking the settings in the dialog which auto opened I fired up Logic and let's see what we've got...

So, first impressions on the sound quality are as good as you'd expect. Certainly the clarity through my little Yamaha MSPs is excellent, not least because I'm able to use the XLR inputs and not the jacks, so the tiny little bit of mid range distortion, which I thought was the monitors, has actually gone. The bass is just ever so slightly more reinforced too. Lovely!

Using the Audio MIDI Setup tool I was able to see which inputs in logic correspond to which inputs on the device too. It's as follows:

1/2 the combis on the front

3/4-9/10 the TRS jack inputs on the back

11/12 reverb from the inbuilt effects processor, so you can track this on a separate track - neat

13/14 the FX return (did I mention this thing has an insert on the back too?)

15/16 SPDIF (I have my DAT connected to that)

17/18-23/24 ADAT channel A

25/26-31/32 ADAT channel B

That's one hell of a set of interfaces. From the blurb it looks like you can run the whole thing at 192KHz (assuming you have the processor for it which I don't) but there's something about the SPDIF maxing out at 96KHz if you use 192KHz on the ADAT. I suggest if you're going to be using high frequencies on the ADAT you read the tech specs.

So, the next thing I did was rename the I/O Labels in Logic and save this as my default template.

I noticed that the sample rate was set to 44.1KHz, and I prefer to work in at least 48KHz. When I tried to change this in the MOTU Audio Setup it changed it back, and the clock light on the front of the panel flashed a few times. I thought it might be because I have a DAT connected, which will have whatever frequency I recorded on that, but turning that off didn't help. One nice thing this device has over my UA is that it seems to be able to change frequency on the fly. The UA actually had a different device for the different frequencies, which meant it was a pain to change between interfaces as you had to power cycle the unit. This doesn't seem to have that constraint, so why can't I change the frequency?

Well, it turns out it's Logic is doing this. I'd not seen this before because in my other device, as I said, the setting was provided from the hardware, but in the Audio options in logic there's an option to change the sample rate. This looks per-project, but I can change my default template to support this I suppose. As it happens, this project was recorded in 44.1 - if I open one that was recorded at 48KHz I guess it would switch. Funnily enough, though, going through looking for a project recorded at 48KHz I can't find one - which means something funny was going on with my last sound card. It looks like even though it had a hardware setting of 48KHz Logic was downmixing this to 44.1 in software or something. How had I not spotted that before?

Sorry about the picture quality - I'm writing this on my ipad using the camera rather than taking screenshots, which would be way more professional, but I wanted to record how I'd got this running right, and this is the easiest way of doing it.

I have a recording day coming up with a barbershop quartet soon and I'm keen to see what the latency is like on this new kit, so I shall post anything interesting. Meanwhile, please feel free to drop me any questions you might have about this device. I got this one for a little over £600 from GAK (with some free headphones actually) but I think the retail is closer to £799. It's definitely a step up in capability for me, and there's lots of potential in this little unit.