Motu STAGE-B16

[Soul'd_Out]

Any thoughts?

http://www.motu.com/products/avb/stage-b16

[cgrafx]

Any thoughts?

http://www.motu.com/products/avb/stage-b16

Looks like an interesting box. I like the AVB connectivity.

Price is listed at $1700

[RBIngraham]

It's a little pricey for the amount of I/O.

The MOTU drivers only allow for the use of USB with windows. None of those units that have thunderbolt will alow the use of thunderbolt with windows.

The windows driver is limited to 64 software I/O no matter how many AVB points you have. Probably due to the bandwidth of USB 2.

The lowest ASIO buffer size is 64 samples.

That's what I know so far. I have been trying to get my hands on some demo units to really try out.

[Soul'd_Out]

Great insight Richard. Thanks!

[mojogil]

The biggest drawback for me is that you can't manually adjust the mic gains from the front panel. I don't like the idea of being tethered to software gain adjustments. It would feel different if the gain adjustment was part of the audio software that you are using but you would have to switch between your audio software and the motu software to adjust the gains. Not very quick and on-the-fly in live audio situations.

[AudioAstronomer]

The biggest drawback for me is that you can't manually adjust the mic gains from the front panel. I don't like the idea of being tethered to software gain adjustments. It would feel different if the gain adjustment was part of the audio software that you are using but you would have to switch between your audio software and the motu software to adjust the gains. Not very quick and on-the-fly in live audio situations.

Personally I'm very interested in this because of the way gain is handled.

The control app is operated via a browser, so you can adjust the gain on the device via a tablet or phone (or computer obviously). IMO that makes it much more 'on-the-fly' than other methods.

Being able to pop out a tablet and adjust pre-amp gain is pretty awesome.

[RBIngraham]

The biggest drawback for me is that you can't manually adjust the mic gains from the front panel. I don't like the idea of being tethered to software gain adjustments. It would feel different if the gain adjustment was part of the audio software that you are using but you would have to switch between your audio software and the motu software to adjust the gains. Not very quick and on-the-fly in live audio situations.

Well considering that the concept is that it would be on stage, with mics plugged into it, being controlled by someone at house mix or maybe mixing monitors, knobs on the front really wouldn't be all that useful. Obviously if you want to just have a rack of mic preamp sitting next to you at house mix, then it's probably not for you and there are plenty of other products that already do that, including good ole fashioned rack mount preamps plugged into analog inputs on an audio interface. And they would probably be a lot more affordable as well unless you want boutique quality preamps or something.

I think the unit looks very interesting myself and I don't care about using software to adjust the preamp. Most audio pros are used to that sort of thing already anyway since unless you're carrying around fully analog consoles you won't have one quick know to grab for preamp gain on most mixing desks today. You have to select the channel, then if you're lucky there is a dedicated know for preamp gain you can tweak. Flipping over to an app to tweak the gain isn't all that different and for the vast majority remote gain control is probably a bonus not a draw back.

Not saying you're wrong. Just saying that if you think about the target audience it makes sense and most will appreciate the browser based GUI.

My concern is primarily the latency of the interface with the combination of the ASIO driver, plus the hardware itself and if AVB adds any (shouldn't add much) it could lead to a large amount that could be problematic depending on the requirements of the show/venue.


If you're using it as your mixing console (as they suggest) it does at least have an OH S H I T button, to mute all outputs, similar to the Presonus. (are you paying attention Mackie?) :)

[Mattseymour]

It's an interesting, if pricy product. MOTU stuff has never been cheap though. I'd be very interested if we could take AVB into the PC. uSB is not ok for this sort of thing in my mind.

[RBIngraham]

It's an interesting, if pricy product. MOTU stuff has never been cheap though. I'd be very interested if we could take AVB into the PC. uSB is not ok for this sort of thing in my mind.

It's cheaper than RME. :) Seriously I've always thought of MOTU as being the affordable interfaces. Yeah it's not M Audio cheap, but most of the stuff in that price range is garbage, fit only for the bedroom musician. Not even close to a pro audio solution.

Once again.... there is no way to directly get AVB into Windows at this point in time. Perhaps some day Microsoft will support it directly but I am not going to hold my breath for that to happen. :) The only reason you can plug these MOTU boxes directly into your Mac is because Apple did all the work for MOTU. The latest version of OS X supports AVB directly. So all you need to plug in your Mac is a network cable and if you want multiples, an AVB compliant switch.

The only real solution to connect Windows to an AVB network is thru some sort of bridge, typically to ASIO. Echo Audio is making an AVB compatible NIC card with an ASIO driver, but it is not inexpensive. The only other AVB audio interface solutions I know of are these MOTU units. Oh and Audio Science makes an AVB to ASIO bridge driver but it is stupidly expensive (thousands of dollars for a driver), but it does let you use a fairly cheap Intel AVB NIC card. :rolleyes:

[TomyN]

Well, in my opinion motu is a company which will offer all the stuff needed to get your signals into your computer (the 424/324 based system is an example for that). So I'm exspecting a avb<-> pci card from them. Interal it should 'resolve' to ASIO, because this would give the oportunity to access the data from (nearly?) all software which deals with digital audio.

I'm still dreaming of a two AES Ports to PCI card from/for Behringer...

By the way, I'm controlling the gain of my first 24 inputs via a sac plugin, and all the other inputs (up to 64) use 'stage adjustable' gain. Both worked fine for me.

Tomy

[RBIngraham]

Well, in my opinion motu is a company which will offer all the stuff needed to get your signals into your computer (the 424/324 based system is an example for that). So I'm exspecting a avb<-> pci card from them. Interal it should 'resolve' to ASIO, because this would give the oportunity to access the data from (nearly?) all software which deals with digital audio.

I'm still dreaming of a two AES Ports to PCI card from/for Behringer...

By the way, I'm controlling the gain of my first 24 inputs via a sac plugin, and all the other inputs (up to 64) use 'stage adjustable' gain. Both worked fine for me.

Tomy

Well just my opinion but I seriously doubt you're going to see much of anyone still doing PCIe (let alone PCI... that's very unlikely) cards. So few computers have slots anymore, almost everyone wants a laptop or very portable solution.... actually everyone wants everything to run on their iPad or tablet of choice but that's a ways off yet.

Just look at all the new products in the last few years. Who has brought out any new card slot based products at all? I'm sure there are some but I can not remember any off the top of my head. It's all USB or Thunderbolt or some other type of non slot based connection.

Like it or not the recording folks are who the vast majority of the audio interfaces are designed for. They don't care about a bit of latency in the connection to the software since they can monitor via the mixer that is built into most interfaces these days. Or they have a console in the studio.

Also most audio folks are Mac heads these days. No more Apple computers with slots. So if you make a card based solution, you just made a Windows only device. Seriously doubt anyone is going to go that route and eliminate those potential sales.

[Mattseymour]

I'm sure you're right about that Richard. Also don't forget that thunderbolt is essentially just pcie so you get all that high bandwidth stuff over a simple external connection.

One thing I do like about moth is their driver support. I'd have confidence that anything they're releasing now will be well supported for a good while unlike focusrite, for example, who have dropped quite a few products over the years, quite a short time after release.

[RBIngraham]

I'm sure you're right about that Richard. Also don't forget that thunderbolt is essentially just pcie so you get all that high bandwidth stuff over a simple external connection.

One thing I do like about moth is their driver support. I'd have confidence that anything they're releasing now will be well supported for a good while unlike focusrite, for example, who have dropped quite a few products over the years, quite a short time after release.

Just to pick nits Thunderbolt is really Display Port with a PCIe bus. And as I found out not too long ago, Mini Display Port is the same damn cable as Thunderbolt. Just to add to the fun of keeping track of all this crap. :)

MOTU has gotten a lot better in my opinion, but they used to be terrible with drivers, particularly with Windows drivers. They were garbage in the MOTU Time Piece days. Still, I sort of keep MOTU in that same vane as Microsoft. You don't really want to use version 1 of their stuff. Wait until the equivelant of Service Pack 1 comes out. Probably just my bias from years past. But the early days of windows drivers for things like the 324 card based systems were not that great either. At the end of the day I think they still have a fair amount of leaning towards a Mac priority over Windows. Which is fine... it's just something you keep in the back of your mind.

I agree that Focusrite is not the best. I've always found their drivers to leave a lot to be desired. And they clearly are only concerned with the project studio type crowd.

Oh well, as we all know if you have the money and you want something that just works, just pony up the bucks for RME. And I would just go with a nice MADI set up, even though that's a point to point system and not a network. Although the RME sales rep was through just last week and they said they do realize the folks want networked audio, it's on their radar. They have just stuck with MADI because they know it works and it means less customers with issues.

[Nathan P]

Some Windows motherboards have built in Thunderbolt. I've not used them, but I'm glad to see ASUS is investing in this technology.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77V_PROTHUNDERBOLT/

[RBIngraham]

Some Windows motherboards have built in Thunderbolt. I've not used them, but I'm glad to see ASUS is investing in this technology.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8Z77V_PROTHUNDERBOLT/

Unfortunately that doesn't mean that MOTU will ever create windows drivers for their AVB interfaces that can utilize their Thunderbolt connection. There has been options to add Thunderbolt connectivity to a PC for a while now. Not many of course, but it's been around for a while. But unless MOTU writes the drivers... it's worthless. At least as it applies to this particular interface anyway.

[Mattseymour]

Some nice things have been said about the quality of preamps and converters in the new motu kit.