Hi Daniel,

Thanks.  Just curious, the Octamic is roughly the same price as a Fireface 800.  So, if one already has a Babyface, but needed to record 4-8 channels simultaneously, would it be better to use the Octamic as a front-end to the Babyface, or to buy the Fireface?

Thanks,
Steve

HI Steve,
Either will work fine. The FF800 will be more complicated to deal with at first sense you will install the driver and plug the Firewire into your system in order to setup the routing for stand alone AD/DA mode. It will also only have the 4 Mic-Pres. The rest will all be line level.
The FF800 would be useful though say if you used it say in the studio and then used the babyface for mobile use.
You can have both plugged into your system at once as long as you have a free USB and a free Firewire port.
On the PC they will be seen as 2 different devices. On the MAC you can set them up as a Aggregate device which makes them show up as one audio device with  all the I/O from units list together. On the PC you will them listed as separate devices under ASIO and under WDM.
What I would do If I was wanting to use both would be to use the FF800 as the main unit and then plug the Babyfaces ADAT and SPDIF I/O into the FF800. This way channels 13-20 (ADAT port 1) on the FF800 become extra analog line and Mic-pres and you can use the left over digital I/O for accessing the Babyface built in effects for recording or for effects send/returns inside you recording program.

With this setup you could even add the Octimic II to ADAT port 2 at some point as long as you working at 44.1/48k you will get 16 channels of ADAT to utilize.
If your system does not have Fire wire then it is less attractive than the Octamic II sense you would need to setup the stand alone routing on another computer in order to do this.
The Octamic II would be the most straight forward solution in this case. Just plug in cables and go.

Chris

Octamic II preamps are a newer design, so better than FF800, roughly the same as Babyface.

Hi. I have been happily using a FF800 for quite some time, but want to add a mobile component to my rig as well as access some of the in-built effects and features of TotalMix FX in my studio. My budget is tight and I have a line on a reasonably priced babyface.

If I am reading the above post correctly, is there a way - via creating an aggregate device on Mac OSX - to maximize the I/O of the combined units (FF800+babyface) AND utilize the new features of TMFX?  If this were possible, I would be thrilled.

Scanning the documentation online and the forums, I haven’t been able to concretely determine if this is the case. Can anyone help me by providing some clarity? Thx!

Right now I am running the FF800 with an additional 8ch of input via a separate ADAT converter box, with plenty of outboard pres into a Mac.

A very good unit is a Audient 8 channel preamp. Get the new ASP880 or the older ASP008 with the optional adat card.

All analog I/Os of the BF can be used with the FF800 via ADAT. That was not the point of the previous posts.

Annnnd I think I figured it out.  Feel slightly boneheaded... though to be fair, I can't find an explanation of how to do this very clearly in the manual.  But I'm all set.