Just got this last night at a ridiculous price. Have not fired it up yet but it looks incredibly well-featured and does jut about everything I might likely ever need from an audio interface...
Man that is a nice looking piece of gear, let us know how the converters do their job.
We ran it under fire to record a live gig last night. From opening the box to recording in Pro Tools, it was 10 minutes. Granted, we already had Pro Tools M-Powered installed, and had tested it with two other m-audio devices, and we brought the USB key with us.
Great box... both of us were super-impressed with the smrothness of the knobs, each channel front panel lights up when audio is hitting it, and the clip lights were bright red and correlated perfectly with the clipping indicators in Pro Tools. Even in the dark of a gig it was easy to grab the right knob and adjust volumes on the fly. The other bonus... we brought only a TRS-1/4" 8-channel snale, so we ended up connecting the box via XLR. While we were originally worried about this, all eight gain knobs on the m-audio box are push-pull, and you just pull it the knob out to drop 20 dB. That was ridiculously handy. We ended up pulling them all out as we got levels off the board. Without the manual, we were able to fire up the control panel, which was totally gorgeous--live VU meters on every input in the software, all kinds of insane routing options... we set up our routing for the first eight inputs in 2 minutes flat, without reading a word of documentation... a testament to the ease of use. BTW, we ran it on a Mac laptop... we have a Macbook and my work Dell for recording, and I didn't want to use the work system since I'm in the throes of a release. Recording 8 channels, the Mac was at 2-3% CPU and almost nothing on the disk I/O, according to the Pro Tools meters. Granted, that's a tiny session, but I was impressed nonetheless at how low usage it was.
Haven't listened to the session yet but will, and I will post some of it as soon as I get a chance. The outboard was pretty nice... the club we were tracking at has a Midas Venice board and some really choice mics... so it should sound pretty good.
Anyway, so far this thing is totally killer...