Well, I suppose we all live and learn. I just couldn’t stay away. I returned to an old flame after nearly a year. My friends, I give you the RME Fireface 400.
Love at first byte
OK – so most of you will get the joke – because this audio interface uses a “FireWire” 1394 connection, I refer to it as “my old flame“. I had this model in my studio for a while, and now that I’m focusing on music for surround, I’m doubly glad to have it back. For one, it has tremendous audio quality. Two, the drivers (on Windows, at least) are rock solid and I can get insanely low latencies with it for the demands of real-time tracking. And three, their audio monitoring software – DIGICheck – is simply fantastic.
RME DIGICheck (click to see full size)
It not only shows the relative power of volume going to each output in the 5.1 surround field (in the pentagonal “jellyfish” pattern shown above) but there are also extremely valuable correlation meters below and K-System level meters to the right. This means your eyes can help you confirm what your ears are hearing – and – sometimes also reveal things that may slip by. The correlation meters are particularly useful for making sure that you’re not creating rough mixes that invite trouble in the pre-mastering stage. The last thing you want is to hand off your songs to a mastering engineer and have them think “what moron did this?” Well, they might still say that to themselves, but it will be because of the quality of the music – not the mix. And as far as an audio interface and monitoring software is concerned, that’s all I can hope for.
A special shout-out goes to Phil Soussan of Soussan Pro Audio. He literally went the extra mile to get this to me today. Not only is Phil a tremendous musician running a top notch company, he’s also one of the nicest guys on the planet.
Kudos to Soussan Pro Audio for helping to make this the best birthday I’ve had in a while (officially my birthday is tomorrow – but this is worth celebrating a few hours early).
