Recording - October 2009 - 36

& where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording M-Audio ProFire 610 A time-honored design meets modern by Mike Metlay DSP tweaks I n our May 2004 issue, we looked at the FireWire 410, M-Audio’s first affordable multitrack audio interface using FireWire. At the time, USB 2.0 was still a long ways away, and if you wanted more than stereo I/O, you needed FireWire and the M-Audio box represented a new price point for this technology. Time marches on, and now there are a gazillion audio interfaces using USB 2.0 and FireWire that surpass what the old 410 could do, but there’s still a place for the half-rackspace basic interface in many studios, and M-Audio has modernized the 410 into a tasty little box called the ProFire 610. The tests The ProFire 610 steps out ahead of its predecessors in several areas. The first one I noticed when hooking it up to my portable musicmaking rig was the quality of the preamps—the two pres in the ProFire 610 feature technology from M-Audio’s Octane rackmount preamp/converter box, and they’re an obvious step up from the workmanlike pres in the 410: clean, clear, lownoise, and unobtrusive. The second big improvement was the extra pair of line inputs: it always drove me crazy that if I didn’t have a stereo A/D box handy, the 410 was effectively only a stereo-in box. Being able to input a stereo source and a mic different monitor mixes. Up to five separate stereo monitor mixes can be sent out of the eight analog and two digital outputs, using a desktop mixer application that also lets you set clock rates, sync sources, and which output signal pairs the Master Volume knob does or doesn’t control. You can even minimize the interface to only show the metering, turning the mixer into a standalone level meter application. Other nice touches: an internal DSP chip lets the ProFire 610 process inputs and route them directly to outputs for low-latency mixing, and if you power up the unit without a computer connected it will happily do double duty as a 2-channel preamp and A/D–D/A converter using the S/PDIF jacks. The converters, by the way, can operate at up to 24-bit/192 kHz, but with greatly reduced track count, and you can’t use the ProFire 610 as a standalone converter at rates above 48 kHz. So There are a lot of choices out there today for audio interfacing, but M-Audio always manages to create solutions with a good mix of portability, flexibility, and simplicity, with a few nice extras thrown in for good measure. The ProFire 610 takes a proud tradition forward into the realm of modern DAWs, and does it with class. Price: $499.95 More from: M-Audio, www.m-audio.com. The basics As is common with M-Audio interfaces, the numbers refer to ins and outs: six inputs and ten outputs, to be precise. The ProFire 610 offers four channels of analog input and eight analog outputs plus coaxial S/PDIF in and out, and MIDI I/O as well, in a box that comes with an AC adaptor but is very happily bus-powered from any 6-pin FireWire 400 connection. The front panel has two of the inputs— combination jacks that can handle an unbalanced 1/4" or balanced XLR input, with gain knobs that pull-click to engage 20 dB pads. There are two 1/4" headphone outputs with independent level pots, a programmable Master Volume knob, and switches for interface power and global phantom power. On the back, we have two 1/4" TRS balanced line-level inputs, eight 1/4" TRS balanced line-level outputs, S/PDIF on RCA jacks, MIDI, and two FireWire 400 ports, plus the power jack. 36 RECORDING OCTOBER 2009 and a guitar, all hooked up at once, was a nice touch. Speaking of guitars: the 1/4" inputs on the front panel have an input impedance of 1 Megohm and are unbalanced—in plain English, they’re set up to accept signals straight from a guitar or bass, not a line-level source. There’s no Hi-Z switch, as the front-panel 1/4" inputs are always “Hi-Z”. The high impedance insures that your instrument’s tone won’t be ruined before it gets to your DAW. The ProFire 610 makes good use of FireWire’s bandwidth; it can send independent signals over all of its inputs and outputs simultaneously. The two frontpanel headphone jacks are wired to listen to Analog Outs 1/2 and 3/4 respectively, so two users can hear

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Recording - October 2009

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