M-Audio Firewire Interface Rich With Features

If you're like I was, you're probably thinking what's the big deal about this interface from M-Audio. It's made for a large market which M-Audio knows very well: professional and amateur musicians and songwriters and home and project studios.

People who have a budget of say a couple grand or more could do better than going for the profire. For me, if I needed to spend that kind of dough for every major piece of gear my home studio may never be ready.

The Profire 2626 has a nice balance of features and quality and price. It usually sells for $699 but you can definitely look around and get it for a much better deal than that.

It's true that for a bit less money you can get an interface that sounds as good as this one but then you'd be missing the features.. such as:

26 simultaneous recordable tracks. This might not always be the case though depending on the settings used…

For example, it can record at a top sample rate of 24-bit/192kHz but if you use the on-board DSP mixer excessively, without any other exterior mixer you won't achieve this high track count. To bring up the number of tracks you need to use a lower sampling rate. Each setup will have unique results depending on settings etc.

The other feature is very low latency because of it's firewire connectivity. A preamp on every one of the 8 input channels and every type of connection any studio would need. World clock, MIDI, S/PDIF, and ADAT.

Actually, you can use it as a standalone pre-amp for up to 8 microphones as well as a standalone 8 channel audio to digital and digital to audio converter.

Still, my favorite feature is it's mixer, letting you create and save 8 stereo mixes which can all be called up at any time. It acts as a router as well sending audio to it's 26 hardware outputs from it's 52 audio streams.

The two other things to mention are it's compatibility with either PC or Mac computers running all the major software programs like Pro Tools, Logic, Sonar, Cubase, Live, GarageBand etc.

Its a mic preamp, A/D converter and a full recording studio if you want it to be.

There is a bit of a debate these days about whether or not Firewire will continue to be around in the distant future. Advances in USB have been made and is now called USB 3.0. No matter what happens with these technologies in the future, what's working good today will still be working good tomorrow and nobody will be able to take anything away from you regardless!

Click for a closer look at the Profire 2626 audio firewire interface