• I use the RME PCIe card with 8 AES channels and various Lavry convertors. It's a pretty reliable piece of kit and they keep releasing drivers and supporting it. I bought the Motu 828 years ago, 2nd hand and paid £500, definitely got my moneys worth, I think the DA sounds much better than the AD on the MKII. Never really had a reliability issue with it. The front pre amps are a problem on a lot of them though.

    Had the Apogee duet at one point, that's a pretty sweet spot in the firewire interface curve. It's not the best I've heard but it integrates vey well with OSX it's quite pretty and a volume knob is always handy.

    Very difficult to set about curing the RFI problems in a PC. I'm guessing you're not running a cheese grater Mac Pro. Apple seemed to do a decent job with shielding on that but of course they keep the power supply well out of the way and physically separated. I still wouldn't risk another USB DAC unless it had a good reputation for RFI rejection.

  • I'm very happy with the RME - it works with no fuss, the mixer matrix is excellent for home studio stuff and it sounds pretty good too. We had a Motu 828mk2 or 3, I think it was the firewire ports that were dodgy but it kept losing connection at inopportune times! Looked a lot tougher than it was.

    Yeah it's a PC - think the case is about 15 years old now (maybe more!). Everything in it has been changed at least once but the problem remains... Admittedly it's inaudible at normal listening levels but it shows up on recorded inputs and layers up louder and louder that way. It isn't there with the isolated gear but it's irritating to remember to unplug stuff as USB midi and USB power is ubiquitous now.

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