[bilco]

Quality: 8
I am going to try to be objective here and give this thing the benefit of the doubt (I rented one for a weekend, messed with it for over 4 hours, never could get it to work, returned it the next day.) It seemed to be solidly built. By all accounts the preamps are pretty good. I like the concept of having 8 good preamps built into the unit, which I wish Digidesign would do. It seemed to be solidly built and from what I remember, the documentation was pretty good.

Reliability: 3
Sorry, but I've pretty much got to pan this thing. I have used my share of audio interfaces, some of them pretty picky. I tried this with my ibook, which works happily with my Mbox and Digi002 Rack and I could not get it to work. The LED that signifies firewire connectivity would not stay on consistently and I was never able to record a single note. As picky as Digidesign and Digigram products can be, I never had to spend 4 hours trying to install one of their products only to come up empty handed. Maybe it was just a bad unit...... after all it came from a place that rents gear out all the time.

I have read lots of glowing reviews of this thing, so I know it must have been a lemon. I have built and worked on enough PCs and installed enough software and audio interfaces to be confident that I am no rookie. I do not plan to ever try this product again.

Overall Rating: 5
Man, I wanted it to work so bad.... I was going to use it to record our band live. The simplicity of one interface with 8 mic preamps built into it running straight into the ibook was so appealing, but it just did not work out. So I had to drag the Digi002 Rack AND the Behringer ADA8000 to the gig. They worked fine all night.

I also have to say that although I like the concept of the flexibility of the routing matrix software, when I looked at it in the book, it looked anything but intuitive. Life is too short to sit trying to figure out something like that. I just want to turn a gadget on and record, right now, without having to wade through a manual trying to figure out how to do the simplest of tasks.

My final beef is that the Cubase LE that it came with that records 8 tracks and seems like it is a perfect match for the Fire Studio does not advertise anywhere that although it allows "up to" 8 tracks, it is limited to 4 simultaneous tracks of recording. That is the kind of lack of truth in advertising that really annoys me.