Members wooden Posted March 9, 2006 Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/ultralite/ I hopw its around $600 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted March 9, 2006 Author Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 yeap, it is http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/UltraLite/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members scapier Posted March 9, 2006 Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 Wow, that's going to give Mbox a run for it's money. Why can't digi step up like this! Spencer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members offramp Posted March 9, 2006 Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 What I want from MOTU is timely, helpful, and polite customer service. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members BrainChild Posted March 9, 2006 Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 quote by wooden -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hopw its around $600 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- $549 at MF http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product?sku=241880 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted March 9, 2006 Members Share Posted March 9, 2006 Having owned MOTU 828mkII for a couple years I think I'd keep shoppin'... the MOTU wouldn't be out of the picture, necessarily, but it certainly would not be at the top of my list.* (It's been mostly quite acceptable. It's reliable. I can't say the converters struck me as any improvement over the Echo Mia in my desktop. And the mic pres are quite dull and dark sounding, I'd have to say bordering on "muffled." They would be the last pre's I would use for almost anything... and I have some pretty cheap and funky pres.) *While I appreciate the 'solid' construction of my 828 (and the new little box appears to use the same design precepts) one of the points of getting a small unit like that is portability. And I can tell you that my 828 is heavier than rack boxes twice its size because of its excessively heavy case. But it'll stop a .25 calibre slug, I'll bet. Maybe a .32. If I had been MOTU, I would certainly have investigated another type of case -- perhaps a composite. Anyhow... I've never had to deal with MOTU directly but I've heard it can be quite frustrating. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members The_Idiom Posted March 10, 2006 Members Share Posted March 10, 2006 Originally posted by blue2blue Having owned MOTU 828mkII for a couple years I think I'd keep shoppin'... the MOTU wouldn't be out of the picture, necessarily, but it certainly would not be at the top of my list.* (It's been mostly quite acceptable. It's reliable. I can't say the converters struck me as any improvement over the Echo Mia in my desktop. And the mic pres are quite dull and dark sounding, I'd have to say bordering on "muffled." They would be the last pre's I would use for almost anything... and I have some pretty cheap and funky pres.) *While I appreciate the 'solid' construction of my 828 (and the new little box appears to use the same design precepts) one of the points of getting a small unit like that is portability. And I can tell you that my 828 is heavier than rack boxes twice its size because of its excessively heavy case. But it'll stop a .25 calibre slug, I'll bet. Maybe a .32. If I had been MOTU, I would certainly have investigated another type of case -- perhaps a composite. Anyhow... I've never had to deal with MOTU directly but I've heard it can be quite frustrating. i'm actually looking at purchasing the 828... and while i;ve heard the pre-amps are lousy... well i'll have 12 other preamp choices before those two.. can anyway say scratch tracks?? but all this complaining about motu customer support... i sent them some e-mails and pretty much got responses within 10 minutes... so i'll have to wait and see with that. and im glad you say its built like a little brick Brandon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members offramp Posted March 10, 2006 Members Share Posted March 10, 2006 Good for you on the 10-minute response time. You are, indeed an extreme minority. Run with it, Forrest. Run. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted March 10, 2006 Members Share Posted March 10, 2006 Originally posted by blue2blue And I can tell you that my 828 is heavier than rack boxes twice its size because of its excessively heavy case. But it'll stop a .25 calibre slug, I'll bet. Maybe a .32. Is this an important consideration in the LBC? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members patshep Posted March 10, 2006 Members Share Posted March 10, 2006 i've never had problems with motu's customer service, they have been good for me... a little wait, but not bad, i've rarely had to call them, everything is pretty stable and well explained in the manual Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ZenFly Posted March 11, 2006 Members Share Posted March 11, 2006 I've only called MOTU once in the 7 years I've been using their product and I felt they were above average in response and knowledge. I use the MOTU2408 MK3 and have had 0 problems as an interface. I don't use the pres as I'm clocking off my DM3200 and sending 24/IO to the MOTU via TDIF. Works great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted March 11, 2006 Share Posted March 11, 2006 Originally posted by offramp Good for you on the 10-minute response time. You are, indeed an extreme minority. Run with it, Forrest. Run. I've played hell trying to get though to MOTU a time or three myself. In fairness, I have to say it's been a couple of years since I've called them, so maybe things have changed for the better. The new box looks pretty cool. If it sounds good, that's a lot of bang for the bucks. I've never been that impressed with MOTU's preamps in the past, and their older converters didn't knock me out either... but the newer stuff is definitely better, and the jury is, of course, still out on the sound of the new unit until everyone gets a chance to hear it. But that IS a lot of I/O and features for a portable, bus powered box. I imagine they'll sell a lot of them to mobie recording enthusiasts. I've had ongoing driver issues with my MOTU parallel port MicroExpress for a couple / few years now. Nothing serious enough to make me have to replace it - and I almost wish that is was bad enough for that, because I get annoyed having to manually "reset" my MIDI interface so that Windows "sees" it every second or third time I reboot. Outsde of that, it does work fine though, so I just have not felt justified dropping a couple / few hundred on another MIDI interface. That's the only MOTU unit I own, so I can't speak beyond that, but I have heard from some other folks that they've experienced driver issues with MOTU hardware on Win XP computers. And driver issues + can't get through easily on the phone can = a recipe for frustration. So I do hope that both those things have improved. I wonder if you can cascade multiple boxes with the new MOTU - has anyone heard anything about that? I didn't see that feature listed on the Sweetwater site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wooden Posted March 11, 2006 Author Members Share Posted March 11, 2006 Originally posted by Phil O'Keefe I wonder if you can cascade multiple boxes with the new MOTU - has anyone heard anything about that? I didn't see that feature listed on the Sweetwater site. Motu's site says so... Every magazine i've read praise motu's converters, so isnt it that true? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted March 11, 2006 Members Share Posted March 11, 2006 Originally posted by UstadKhanAli Is this an important consideration in the LBC? In my old hood, yes, yes it was. I always kept my MOTU unracked and handy in case I had to deflect bullets in a studio-invasion robbery. No... that's a joke. I didn't have the MOTU yet, then. But I DID have a barred metal panic door (inside the house separating the front living areas from the bedroom and studio) and that was no joke. After the first few weeks I lived there (when someone tried to crash through a window while I was not only home but entertaining friends) I never really had any problems. Well, accept the grand theft auto kids running their stolen fam van up onto the curb in front of my house and running through my backyard in a vain attempt to escape about 50 cops. Well... and then there was the (white) gangster I shooed out of my neighbor's yard who said he was gonna go get his "Uzi" and F me up good. He did, indeed, come back witha bout 15 of his best pals and lay a hundred bucks or so of spray paint on my neighbor's wall (different neighbor). Me and my tennant at the time sat waiting with a loaded .45 but they didn't come over the fence. The cops never showed. "Oh, they're just tagging?" Thanks, donut-chompers. (Don't get me wrong -- I told them I'd been threatened only about an hour before with gun violence. Remarkably unflappable.) Anyhow, I live among the rich folks now, and I'm the neighborhood WT, parking my Corolla among the BMRs and top end SUVs (since, here, even the rich don't park in their garages). But the old 'hood calmed down a huge amount in the mid-90s... we went from several volleys of gunfire on a typical night to once every 6 months or so in a matter of a few years. I loved my house, I lived there longer than anywhere else, ever... but I can't say I'm not happy to be out of my old neighborhood. A bit bittersweet, to be sure. But not missing most of it at all... That was then... ... this is now: I can stand in the front yard and see Catalina and a thin slice of Pacific Ocean. The diff is I'm now a carefree renter once again. When, back in the housing boom of the '80s, I bought "a piece of the rock" -- I didn't think it was going to have tin foil wrapped around it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members UstadKhanAli Posted March 11, 2006 Members Share Posted March 11, 2006 Now those are quite a lot of harrowing stories!!! So that picture on the right was your house before? That looks like a nice house! We got a house in the Valley, not my favorite place, but far from the worst...and for now are quite happy here. Got a big back yard, a small house, and a safe neighborhood with lots of great restaurants. See, it's the restaurant thing that's important.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted March 12, 2006 Members Share Posted March 12, 2006 It was a very nice little house. Unfortunately, the neighborhood was destabilized by a short period when zone restrictions were lifted in selected neighborhoods by a developer mayor and his cohorts on the city council. The resulting rash of of overbuilt apartment houses doubled and even tripled neighborhood densities overnight. It was a disgraceful assault on the city that destabilized and sometimes destroyed neighborhoods that had previously been calm, well-maintained, low-density neighborhoods for a half century or more. In retrospect, paying a little more attention to that whole location cubed thing might have been prudent. But it was a great little house. Remind me to show you photos of the breakfast nook sometime. It was in a little turret kind of architectural thing (that's where the guy tried to come through from the front porch, actually)... and the backyard, at its peak, was really sweet, at least from my hermit-in-the-city perspective. It had lots of roses, a fountain, hummingbirds. And my cats prowling it all. There were more than a few moments when I was really, really at home, there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members shniggens Posted March 14, 2006 Members Share Posted March 14, 2006 I haven't been as happy with my MOTU 828 as Blue has. Especially regarding it's reliability. And I will second (third? fourth?) the overall displeasure it is dealing with their customer support. I just feel it's my duty to spread the word!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blue2blue Posted March 14, 2006 Members Share Posted March 14, 2006 My demands haven't been high. It doesn't leave my house. It does power up and power down on a more or less daily basis. It and its driver are a tiny bit fussy about when things get hooked up. I've found its generally better to turn the MOTU on and then plug the FW into XP already booted and running. After that everything's usually hunky dory. (If, OTOH, I absentmindedly turn it on and plug the FW into XP while the MOTU is still doing it bootup cycle, things are not necessarily pretty. Though recovery is as quick as another power cycle on the MOTU.) All that said, there are a lot more options out there now than when I bought the MOTU 2 years ago. I don't want to diss this thing, it's been decent, like a surprisingly reliable American car, or something. Like my slant six Valiant (like a Dart)... it got me from point A to point B reliably. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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