Recently I’d had a lot of trouble with my Focusrite Sapphire 56 audio interface, it would just stop and not produce any sound requiring that I going into the Mixer Interface and disconnect ti and reconnect in order to get it to work. Sometimes this would work sometimes it would not, and even if it did work there was no guarantee that it would continue to work trouble free. It could be 5 hours or 5 minutes and the problem would re-occur, needless to say this was becoming very irritating and was really a mood killer when it can to writing tracks, as a result I had not done a great deal lately.

So I was browsing ebay, looking for alternative audio interfaces. MOTU, Mark Of the Unicorn, was one of the interfaces I was searching on. I had heard of them from years ago but had never given them much through, but to be honest right now none of the interfaces currently on the market worked for me, there seems to be a strong lean towards 2 channel units designed for singer-song writer types that just want to record their guitar and microphone or run a few tracks out of a DAW. I need something more so I can feed all in all my outboard gear and get so good analog warmth, I looked into MOTU and it seemed like a good solution.

What I found was awesome. A studio was selling some of their old gear. thb, most of it was e-waste, piles of old PCI cards, old harddrives, mac books, and PPC G5 Macs, but hiding in the treasure trove where 4 MOTU rack units. By themselves the interfaces are useless, but what I discovered was that I could purchase a separate MOTU 424e PCIe card and bring them back to life. So after a little more investigation that’s what I did.

All up the pile of gear cost me $100AUS and to import that card from the US was $600AUS, but as a result I now have and audio system that is capable of 24 Analog in and 24 Analog out, 4x ADAT lines and 2x AES/EBU lines. Double what I had available on the Focusrite interface, and the software supports Windows 11 properly and does not constantly drop stop. As for the other stuff, well I’ve now thrown out all the old software, I have a box ready to go to the e-waste, I’ve actually used 2 of the G5’s and given one away (more on that later)… and I sold one… for $100, so the MOTO interfaces cost me nothing!