[LAU] Motu 1248 - Full success

Hi Folks, after a long period of being distracted from doing sound work I'm getting back into business. I needed a solid solution for Audio Interface, so I started researching. I must say that from my perspective a lot has happened in the past three four years. More class compliant interfaces enter the market and the horizon widens regarding hardware in Linux. I came across the new Motu AVB devices and could'nt believe that they would be the solution to my hardware problems. The point is, my old studio and travelling interfaces are RME HDSP9652 and TC Impact twin, respectively. The RME always just worked. Pretty low latencies and with the right configuration zero xruns. The TC has a little bit higher latency but also pretty solid. But... they are old interfaces and the time will shortly come when I will not be able to buy a new PC/laptop with PCI or Firwire ports. So I looked for other options... Rme new stuff is mostly class compliant but has proprietary drivers and that means no control over certain features. So I got a pretty good deal on a Motu 1248 and went for it. Here are my first impressions from half a day of testing. First and foremost, the interface just works! Out of the box. I plugged it in configured Jack and got sound. Great... and non trivial for Linux. After a bit of fiddling around with my Network settings I got the control software to work, and I must say it's just amazing to have a piece of equipment that I can fully use under Linux. There is a full featured mixer in the DSP that's also a nice addition, but the main thing for me was the routing matrix, which is pretty cool to have. Latency - The latency in CC mode is better than my Firewire interface, but still a bit worse than the rme. For now I succeded to run a medium session (25 Channels with processing and fx) at 64 frames buffer size with 3 buffers. Certainly not bad. While playing guitar and singing I didn't feel any of this annoying delay that you sometimes get when the latency is bad. Sound quality - Pretty good. I have nothing to complain about... Though I can't really hear the supposedly amazing ESS converters stand out from the other professional DAC crowd... To be honest in the Studio I'm working happily with the old Alesis HD24xr AD/DC to make 1/0 out of my precious electrons... The Preamps are pretty clean sounding from my firswt impression, but I really didn't have enough time to toy with them. The channel count is huge for my terms. 64 in and out... That should be enough for me. Though I didn't get around to check if the AVB connection does really work on Linux. To summarize I'm feeling that we are moving in the right direction here... I hope other manufacturers will follow and make Interfaces and software that work with Linux... Cheers Moshe