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PRODUCT REVIEW: RME FireFace 800 Firewire Audio Interface

In this month’s column I’m reviewing the FireFace 800 firewire audio interface by RME (www.RME-Audio.com)

An audio interface is an important link in your recording chain. Choosing the best audio interface for your needs was the subject of one of my previous columns: Smart Purchasing: How to Choose an Audio Interface

In this column I’ll try to give you a good overview of the features and advantages of the FireFace 800 without getting overly technical. Hopefully this will help you decide if this device would be a good match for your recording needs.

An audio interface is the bridge between the analog and the digital worlds. It takes the analog signal from your microphones and/or instruments, converts that signal into a digital signal and sends that digital signal to your computer to be received by whatever recording software you have chosen to use.

So the core function of an interface is that of analog to digital conversion, or A/D conversion. The conversion process is a complex one, requiring stable hardware and well written algorithms to accomplish it’s task. Among the vast field of manufacturers, RME has a long-standing reputation of making among the best A/D converters in the industry.

The Best

I have been a user of RME interfaces for nearly a decade now, and my experience with their products, and the company itself, has been stellar. Not only are their products well designed and well built, the company’s customer service is about the best I’ve encountered with any electronics manufacturer.

This is a company that you can call on the phone and actually speak to a technician who will stay with you or your problem to get it solved. You can email their tech support and actually get a reply in a reasonable amount of time.

RME designs are the recipients of numerous awards, and virtually hundreds of reviewers rave about the quality and thoughtful design of their products. In addition to the great design and build of their hardware, the software drivers they write to support their units have the reputation of being both stable and efficient whether you are on the Windows or Mac platform.

This is an important point to make note of in choosing an interface. There are manufacturers who make decent hardware but whose software drivers prove to be either unstable of inefficient one one or both platforms. This results in nothing but frustration... an unstable driver will often cause the host application to crash, while a bloated, inefficiently written driver will hog precious RAM and CPU resources.

In my previous column on choosing an audio interface (see link above) I identified 7 questions to ask yourself to aid in the decision making process. Since the questions act as a guide to the features of an audio interface, they can serve as an outline for discussion of the FireFace 800. Here’s a review of the questions:

1. What is your budget range for this purchase?
2. What types, & how many inputs & outputs do you need?
3. Do you require direct monitoring?
4. What sample rate(s) will you need?
5. How important is portability?
6. Do you require MIDI connections? How many?
7. What other hardware do you need your interface to connect to?

Price

Most reviews you read will save the price information for the very end of the review. But I think the decision process has to begin with the reality of our budget considerations. As mentioned in my previous column, how much you should spend on an interface will be influenced by your answers to the following three questions:

• How important is your recording work to your life/career?
• How important is the quality of your recordings?
• Do you anticipate your feature requirements to stay the same or change in the future?

The FireFace 800 falls in the upper range of the price spectrum with a MSRP of $1999.00. Typically you will find the unit offered for $1699.00 and a quick Google turned up at least one retailer offering a new unit at $1499.00. A sizable investment, but in light of the fact that a quality interface can serve your recording needs for many years to come, not unreasonable.

As you will see as we continue, the FireFace 800 is as feature-rich as an audio interface can be. Coupled with the RME quality and customer care, I would have to rate this as an excellent value.

Inputs & Outputs

The FireFace 800 has this category nailed. It includes a variety of both analog and digital inputs and outputs:

Analog Input: 8 x 1/4" TRS, 4 x XLR Mic, 4 x 1/4" TRS Line, all servo-balanced. 1 x 1/4" TS unbalanced
Analog Output: 8 x 1/4" TRS, servo-balanced, DC-coupled signal path. 1 x 1/4" TRS unbalanced
Digital Input: 2 x ADAT optical or SPDIF optical, SPDIF coaxial (AES/EBU compatible)
Digital Output: 2 x ADAT optical or SPDIF optical, SPDIF coaxial (AES/EBU compatible)
MIDI: 1 x MIDI I/O via 5-pin DIN jacks, for 16 channels low jitter hi-speed MIDI

As you can see, the device offers a generous selection of ins and outs. On the front of the unit are the four XLR mic inputs which feed the four mic preamps. Each has a gain control which ranges from +10 dB to +60 dB of gain. Also present on each of these four channels is a 1/4” TRS line input positioned right next to the XLR inputs.

Each of the four mic inputs features three LED indicator lights, one is a clip indicator, one is a signal indicator, and the other indicates whether the 48v phantom power is switched on or off.

Also on the front panel is a single 1/4” TS instrument/line input for plugging in an instrument, such as a guitar. The following is from the product description on the RME website:

“The FireFace 800's Hi-Z instrument input offers a soft-limiter, which has been tuned especially for musical instruments. Due to a soft transition and deliberate creation of harmonics, the input signal is compressed steplessly according to taste, or the limiter can be used for distortion with tube sound. Activate the Drive circuit too for broad guitar distortion. The Speaker Emulation filter, which can also be switched on separately, takes low- and high-frequency disturbances away and guarantees an optimal basic sound even when recording directly into the computer, or when monitoring through a mixing console.”

The front panel also includes the TRS stereo headphone jack for latency-free direct monitoring.

On the back of the unit are 8 1/4” balanced inputs and 8 1/4” balanced outputs, as well as the two sets of ADAT Optical ins and outs (each set capable of up to 8 channels of I/O) and coaxial SPDIF in & out. Also included are wordclock in & out for digitally syncing all your digital gear. A pair of 5-pin DIN jacks rounds out the array offering 16 channels of MIDI in & out.

The unit sports 3 firewire ports, two are Firewire 800 ports and the remaining is a Firewire 400 port. By daisy chaining, it is possible to connect up to three of these units together on a single Firewire 800 bus!

So the device offers a whopping total of 28 ins & outs when both analog and digital categories are totaled. The four mic inputs could easily be supplemented by use of additional preamps feeding the TRS analog inputs if more mic inputs were needed.

This is an ample selection of ins & outs for the recording needs of individual singer/songwriters up to medium sized groups in live settings. In a studio setting this unit could easily handle all but the most complex tracking situations.

Monitoring

The vast selection of output options offer plenty of monitoring opportunities. With the included software mixer, called TotalMix, the creation of submixes and routings is completely flexible. This means that you can use any of the outputs to feed your monitors for completely latency-free monitoring.

Sample Rates

The FireFace 800 supports sample rates of 32, 44.1, 48, 64, 88.2, 96, 128, 176.4 and 192 kHz. This is a larger selection than you will find in most professional grade digital equipment!

Portability

The FireFace 800 takes up a single rack space. This makes the device very easy to transport. I keep mine in a 4U box along with my Focusrite TwinTrak Pro 2 channel mic pre and a compressor unit. The whole box comes along when I have a remote recording gig. Hooked up to my laptop, I have a powerful recording setup ready to go in minutes!

MIDI

Having the MIDI ins & outs is like gravy on an already tasty meal. It’s handy to have it available without needing to hook up & configure a separate MIDI interface. It’s only a single port, though. Granted, that gives you 16 channels of MIDI which should be adequate for most situations. However, if you have a particularly MIDI-heavy gear setup, you may need more than the one port.

Other Hardware Connections

Depending on what other gear you have in your arsenal, you’ll likely find that the FireFace 800 is ready to connect. With it’s selection of both analog and digital connections, it’s hard to imagine a situation that the device could not find easy connection to. In my studio I run one pair of the ADAT Optical I/O to one bank of Optical I/O on my RME RayDat sound card. With this routing I can easily feed signal from the FireFace directly into either my recording software or my Tascam DM-24 digital mixing console.

Software

The unit comes with two necessary software applications: FireFace Settings and FireFace Mixer.

FireFace Settings is the device Control Panel. With a well laid out, intuitive interface it is here that a number of settings are made to configure the device. This includes input & output gain selections, phantom power switching for the four individual mic inputs, sync settings and more.

It is important to note that once settings have been set in this dialog, the unit will retain the settings even when not hooked to a computer. This way, the device can be used in stand-alone mode.

The FireFace Mixer is an extremely powerful software mixer with three banks of faders. The top bank of faders control the inputs, the middle bank controls the playback, and the bottom bank are the output faders. Each fader features a level meter, mute and solo buttons and channel selection drop-down.

A powerful feature of the mixer is the “Matrix View” option which displays a grid representing the unit’s inputs on the vertical axis and the outputs on the horizontal axis. Clicking on any intersection connects the corresponding inputs & outputs, and further allows immediate adjustment of gain levels directly in the intersection grid square.

Conclusion

This audio interface has it all, numerous ins and outs in several formats, complete routing flexibility, four discrete high-quality mic pres, superior AD/DA converters, fast Firewire 800 data transmission, powerful intuitive software and portability. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a quality audio interface.