M-Audio Firewire 1814: Opinions, alternatives, etc.

[rollo47]

So, I've just come into some money, thanks to an arts scholarship that I've won. How exciting Anyway, I asked a while back about recording gear, and the M-Audio Firewire 1814 came highly recommended.

So, I've got a few questions about it. How is the unit powered? I ask because I'm from Australia, and don't want to order one from the US, only to find that it won't work over here.

Are there any alternatives that I should be checking out? Anything cheaper?

And finally, any opinions on the unit would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

-Riley

[rollo47]

Anyone?

[MKS]

First of all, congrats on the scholarship!

I use one of these at home and I've been pretty happy with it. There are a couple of options for powering the unit: If you have a 6-pin firewire socket on your PC then you can power it direct from the PC. If you have a laptop with a 4-pin / i-Link or if you power the unit from a 6-pin firewire PCMCIA card socket then you need an external power source. The external PSU is a brick - 12V DC (I thinK). The good news is that these can be picked up fairly easily at most electrical stores / hobbyist shops. So even if you bought from the US, all you would need to do is to find a replacement PSU. This shouldn't be too expensive.

The FW1814 works pretty well. I have used it with a Behringer ADA8000 which squirts another 8 mic inputs down optical cable extending the input / output to the full 16 in / 12 out. Note that the extra 2 in / 2 out is via SPDIF digital. What this means in practice is that I can have 10 mic channels and 6 line level channels which is more than sufficient for most of the stuff I've done to date. There are two headphone channels which can be useful for recording, and you can A/B the signals on one of the headphone outputs. The front two mic channels have a pad switch so that you can tailor the input to whatever signal comes in. For example I plug my (active) bass into one channel and with the pad engaged I can turn up the gain to get a reasonable signal.

It's a good idea to download drivers from the M-Audio website rather than rely on packaged CD-ROM drivers that come with the unit. The latest driver features a really nice method for altering how you view the mixer.

Hope this is useful info...

Mike

[rollo47]

Thanks for the info!

I was hoping it was a wall-wart type thing, rather than just a standard 3-pin cable or something.

[opium89]

I've tried to use M-Audio stuff two or three times in the past and I've simply never had it work properly. There's much better products out there. Check out Edirol, MOTU, and if you really want some bang-buck, check out the Presonus Firebox.