M-Audio Firewire 410, Echo Layla 3G, or MOTU 828 for new soundcard?

musman wrote on 8/27/2004, 12:55 AM

I need to buy something in the next couple days here to replace my sound audigy card on my 2 year old workstation and want something I can also use when I buy a new laptop in the next year.
So, what I was really looking for was:

1- something to record live dialog for VO work with the workstation and the laptop
2- possibly record live field work (indie film dialog) onto the laptop
3- to load material from my friend's DAT (a Tascam DAP1 which I borrow a lot) w/o doing an D/A transfer.
4- for use when mixing Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes with Sony Vegas & Sound Forge.
I'm chosing these models b/c they were spoken of in good regard with the Vegas people.
At B&H I can get the Firewire 410 for $350 or the MOTU 828 for around $750, whereas the Layla 3G sells here for about $450:

http://www.proaudiotoys.com/store/product.aspx?prdId=163785

I'm still pretty green on sound cards, so please forgive me if I'm comparing apples to oranges. The MOTU 828 did seem interesting with it's ability to be used as a stand alone mixer, but I'm wondering how useful that would be without battery power and for use with my pd150.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could offer me some advice here. Thanks ahead of time for any help!

Comments

farss wrote on 8/27/2004, 4:00 AM

I have the M-Audio Firewire 410, bought it for much the same set of criterion as you have. So far it does daily service as my sound card, has recorded hours of VOs from Rode NT1A, and transfered 100s of hours of audio from DAT via SPDIF.
Haven't tried it in the field on the laptop but I know SPOT uses the same box on the road so what more can one say.

Bought mine from www.sweetwater.com, nice bunch of guys and very professional, even sent me an email to make certain I had received it and it worked OK. On top of that they found me the best deal on shipping which saved me a lot.

Only issue I have almost certainly isn;t the fault of the 410. Not all firewire devices play nicely with it. DSR-11, J30, DSR-45, PD 150 and my D8 camera and Canopus ADVC-300 not a problem if you make certain all devices are on and connected at power up.

However older Sony gear doesn't work so well, GV-D900 caused major audio nasties just now, had to power 410 down to capture from VCR and cold restart 410 after disconnecting VCR. Like I say I think this is an issue with the firmware in the older Sony gear.

Only gripe I could really aim at the 410, could use a bit more gain on the mic channels. Running ASIO there is a slight start up latency from when it is sent audio to when it outputs it, typically mis the first second. Once it's got its act together no problem, probably it has issues with the Windoz sound outputs and switching to ASIO. Bear in mind I'm also running Win2K, probably works better under XP.

Bob.

Bob.

musman wrote on 8/27/2004, 12:42 PM

Forgive my ignorance here, but the latency would be an issue if I were doing ADR work, right? One second does sound like a lot of time and that is a feature I'll probaly need at some point.

Spot|DSE wrote on 8/27/2004, 12:58 PM

Latency is a huge issue, but if there is one second of latency on ANY sound card that uses ASIO or WDM drivers, there is a buffering problem of some sort. You shouldn't ever see more than 10 ms of latency with Vegas and any semi-professional sound card, and that's not enough to worry about.
I love the Echo products and the M-Audio products. Avoid anything that is USB if you're recording. USB is fine for playback, but not for recording.

farss wrote on 8/27/2004, 3:25 PM

Just to explain, I knew someone would misread what I said.
There is no latency between the audio and video, it's perfect. The problem (and it's just annoying) is the first time you hit Play on the Vegas TL the 410 takes about a second to start outputing the audio. The audio is in perfect sync, no latency. After that it works instantly.
If I exit Vegas and run some non ASIO stuff and then go back into Vegas same thing again. I can see how this could happen, probably drive confusion for a brief second while Windoz sorts itself out.

Bob.

Spot|DSE wrote on 8/27/2004, 4:03 PM

Bob, if you're seeing some delay before the buffer fills, you might try setting your buffer back a little.It should be instant. Unless of course, you've got other things on the bus. I've avoided this with some of the lesser quality tools like the MOTU by using one of the NNovia switches, so that all things start with the same ID on the 1394 bus.