Steinberg MR816csx

[royfagon]

Had this little box of tricks now for a couple of weeks and I'm still trying to get to grips with it. No so much the hardware but the software. In short what it offers is great. 8 grade A pre-amp inputs and 8 ADATs output is limited to 8 analogue out and 8 digital but I think you ccan only have some much of one if using the other. The quick connect feature is good for when you're in Cubase and add a new audio track and you want to assign it to one of the inputs as all you have to do is click the Quick Connect button on the rack and it will adjust the software to route that channel to the track. I've just about got the Control Room feature setup going ok but the headphone routing isn't as straightforward.
The Yamaha ASIO seems stable enough but there's no MIDI interface on the unit so you may still require an interface card to do this for you.
The whole unit replaced my 16 channel mixer although I could have routed the output of this to the MR816csx and still use it but I wanted the space. Quite costly at £800 but if prices drop I will get a second. You can chain up to three via FireWire. You still need an external power supply though as Steinberg couldn't achieve what SSL's Duende could by just running off the Pc power. I'm 60/40 on this one, only time will tell. Once my vocalist starts pumping her longs through the Grade 'A' pre-amp and is listening to me via the Control Room with Zero latency then we'll see. You can setup four individual studio headphones so the drummer can hear one setting the guitarist another and the vocalist and drummer another. Complete control over performers headphones which I thought was cool.