Divo,
Most members with an opinion have reported dissatisfaction with the dynamics section of the Focusrite, complaining that the comps and limiters were noisy. Many say the pres are ok but I have a feeling they are not that great, as I believe these are the same pres that are packaged in the Pro Tools LE 001 & 002 boxes and a lot of folks complain about those. I have heard nice things regarding the pre in the MOTU interfaces. That's the word on the street. But as I have pointed out previously, don't expect top performance from any of these pres. Good pres cost money to manufacture and the cheapest I have seen any pre of any quality was about $375.00 USD per channel. That would be for the Sebatron vmp -4000e quad pres retailing at $1497.00 USD. JLM has a nice 8 channel pre that is very much like the Focusrite "Red" range pre and retails for $1750.00 USD. This breaks the per channel price barrier at $218.75 per channel. As you can see, the economy of scale can really bring the prices down. That is because power supplies are much of the cost in these designs. When multiple channels can share a common power supply, the cost per channel can be reduced. JLM is going to be sending me one of their TMP8 channel pres to evaluate in the near future, so keep and eye out for the review. Kurt

Thanks Kurt,

So perhaps the 24 i/o with one or two of the pre's you mentioned would be a better proposition. I suppose that would free me up for some other analog gear, routing back into the unit and give me enough pre's to get some nice clean drum tracks down. I may have to make some sacrifices in other areas....Hmmmm......Guess the control surface is going to have to wait.....Ah only a luxury anyhoo......

I've used both the MOTU and Focusrite preamps, and I think that the Focusrite preamps are a noticeable improvement over those in the MOTU boxes.

Most members with an opinion have reported dissatisfaction with the dynamics section of the Focusrite, complaining that the comps and limiters were noisy.

By nature, the compressors that are built into the OctoPre are not very versatile...they lack the controls you may be used to in dedicated compressors. But when used for very light compression or simple peak limiting, they can actually be quite useful.

Many say the pres are ok but I have a feeling they are not that great, as I believe these are the same pres that are packaged in the Pro Tools LE 001 & 002 boxes and a lot of folks complain about those.

That is not correct. They are definitely not the same preamps that are in the 001 or the 002. (For that matter, the 002's preamps are a big improvement over the 001's.) They M Box's preamps are based on the preamps in the Octo Pre, but they're not the same. The Octo Pre uses the same preamps as the rest of the Platinum series and the Digidesign Control 24. They're a step or two up from most console or interface preamps, but not quite where the Red/ISA preamps are. They Platinum preamps lean more towards the "transparent" side of things than the "character" side of things.

As you can see, the economy of scale can really bring the prices down. That is because power supplies are much of the cost in these designs. When multiple channels can share a common power supply, the cost per channel can be reduced.

That's right...and the Octo Pre has a pretty beefy power supply for its eight channels.

-Duardo