rounik music wrote:
Thanks Thomjinx,
Metric Halo's have a very good reputation for both quality of preamps, extremely low latency and very stable and well-written drivers for OSX. Was just interested to see if you'd tested it along with the other gear and how it ranked. Am weighing up between Metric Halo, Apogee, RME or MOTU for a client soon.
Metric Halo.
I have a Mobile I/O 2882 +DSP, upgraded to 2d when those cards came out.
The DSP stuff is really, really good, routing possibilities are completely open (with the 2d card that they all now have). You can build your complete mixer/routing system, with some of the best-sounding DSP plugs, and full monitor routing, and save that as boot state.
All outputs can directly drive headphones, so it works as an 8-channel headphone amp as well.
Support is extremely fast and top-notch, and a company offering an after-market hardware upgrade for their own products EIGHT YEARS after they were released to bring them up to identical spec with hardware sold today (as happened with the $400 2d card) is just utterly insane. Any normal company sells you a new interface every four years.
When 10.5 Leopard was released, I got the final drivers via e-mail from the local distributor a full week BEFORE release date. When 10.6 was released - a month early, to the surprise of most - the final drivers were available for download the night before official release date.
The Metric Halo interfaces were among the few that were completely unfazed by the supposedly "bad" Agere Firewire chips. No complaints. BJ knows his Firewire specs and codes properly.
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/166225-imac-mb-mbp-agere-firewire -chipsets-can-troublesome-okt-07-till-feb-08-a.html
As for the sound quality - they blow MotU out of the water, and I like'em better than RME's. Haven't compared to Apogee's stuff. And, of course, the 2d card brought a new clock circuit which further improved sound quality.
</rant_off>
(Edit: I'm such a fanboi. 🙂 )