RME Fireface 800 review
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 12 Feb 2007

If you're a musician, how many times have you wondered what should you buy to make your studio setup perfect? How many times did you "surf" the Internet desparately trying to find a perfect "base" for your studio that has that amazing mixture of quality, decent price and versatility? If you're one of these people, let me take you through a wonderful world of Fireface 800, RME's Firewire audio card that will make you smile.
Well, after unpacking this rather large box (after all, this is a 19" rack piece of hardware), you realize that this is not just "another" card. This is something that becomes blindingly apparent after first couple of hours of usage, but I was actually able to abuse it for three months prior to writing this review. Let's forget the fact that it really looks awesome (a matter of taste), and that it's supposed to do many wonderful things judging by the box and specs and dig very deep "in" this device. Step-by-step, of course...

Specification

Let's browse through FireFace 800 specifications for awhile:

- up to 56(!) channels of recording/playback
- up to 192 kHz sample rate on all channels(every input, output, and headphone connector)
- Firewire 800 support
- mixture of RME's technologies - ADI-8 converters, Quad/OctaMic preamps, TotalMix, DIGICheck
- up to 119dBA dynamic range
- 8 balanced line inputs and outputs (-10dBV, +4dBu, HiGain)
- headphone equals Channel 9/10 playback, so you're able to use it in ASIO Direct Monitoring
- four (4) balanced microphone inputs (48V Phantom power)
- built-in limiter
- Drive circut
- Speaker Emulation
- two ADAT IN/OUTs, ADAT2 channel can also be used as S/PDIF optical IN/OUT
- up to 14 independent stereo submixes
- MIDI IN/OUT
- S/PDIF coaxial IN/OUT
- WORD CLOCK IN/OUT
- daisy-chain up to three units

That's a lot of data, right? Well, not really, not even close. What I didn't tell you that I actually used two FireFace 800's for this test. So, you know all of these numbers and specs you just went through? Well, multiply everything by two :-) And beware - we used the meanest and craziest syntheseizer out there for our test - Korg's OASYS. Now we can move on and describe the TotalMix feature.