My Big Motu Rig: 54 in 48 out alltogether

Incredible! At the end I succeeded ...

At a very small price I bought 6 MOTU interfaces (all used old/MK3 interfaces).

3x MOTU 828 MK3 Firewire (300€ each)

1x MOTU 896 MK3 Hybrid (500€)

1x MOTU 896 MK3 Firewire (300€)

1x MOTU 8PRE (300€)

+ 3 PCI/PICe Firewire Texas Chipsed boards (about 90€ overall)

As you can see the total amount spent is very limited but the power you gain with this outboard is very very high!

The RIG works at 96Khz 24bit.

3 interfaces are connected to 3 dedicated PIC/PICe Firewire boards: 896 FW, 896 HY and 828. The other 3 interfaces are connected to the 3 above via ADAT connection (2x connection).

This allows to move 8 INs and 8 OUTsto and from the hosting board.

The PC is a 12 Core XEON workstation with 32G RAM and SSD disk for OS.

The PC was originally prepared by SONUX, but I updated it completely and connected to internet with Synantec Security with no degradation of performances.

I use CUBASE 7.5.4. The MOTU control panel is set to a 256 buffer size that allows to avoid spikes but preserves very low latency (less then 10ms for complete input/output rig).

This way I can monitor real time with channel strip/digital effects.

The monitoring/cueing Board and clock source is the 896 MK3 Hybrid.

The 828 is slaved physically to he 896 MK3 Master Clock output.

The other 896 Firewire is synched to the 896 Mk3 master clock.

I'm proud of the result I obtained after hundreds of failing test and problem due to the intrinsisc physical limitation of the boards and Firewire channels.

let me know if you need more infos, I can tell you!