Hi there
Mick Just be careful with the Unitor 8 as it is in Australia and the power supply will feature our mains plug not yours.
(if you are overseas that is) But it is no biggie because it is only a simple 9V
AC power supply so any decent powersupply will work. It draws very little current too.
(If you are going to use a DC powersupply you will need a 12V DC powersupply because 9 V AC is the rms value and the peak value of that is 12V DC) The AMT is also good because it has both serial port and USB connections like the Unitor 8 Mk II. I dont think there is much difference between those two models anyway.
(AMT has no click input) I have always felt midi timing in my system to be excellent and I think one of the reasons is that it is on the serial port and there is no other activity on that port hence the midi interface gets that port all to itself. Midi is rock solid here and is not easily effected by anything else that may be going on in my system which is actually very good. The serial port while slow compared to the USB port is still way fast enough for any midi transmission that might be going over it.
Unitor 8 Mk II has other cool things too like SMPTE generation and read so you can lock stuff to SMPTE pretty easily. Also there is a click input
(only on Unitor 8 Mk II, they dropped this on AMT8 for some reason) and you can feed in an audio signal eg a cowbell or clave sound produced by hand or live. Unitor will see this and can generate a midi clock that is in sync with this input! Try doing that on some other interfaces!
There is some software you will need as well that I am sure you can still download from Emagic or Apple. I can give it to you if you cannot find it. It is a nice program that can run Unitor complete in a stand alone mode so even if you have no DAW booted up and taking control you can still run it and patch any input to any output etc..
(You also need this software to do any SMPTE stuff as well) It is nice having 8 MIDI INS as well. They all merge basically into your DAW so you can have many midi input sources feeding it. Such as synth outs for data dumps, digital mixers etc...as well as multiple keyboard controllers.
There is also a panic button on the front which is also very useful. If any of your synths get stuck for any reason it is a super fast way to shut them up. I know Sonar has a midi panic facility anyway but Studio One for instance does not which is a bit weird. But the panic button on Unitor is very good and does the job well.
Also use all the MIDI OUTS to feed all of your instruments. Rather than put several synths on one midi port and setting different midi channels, put them on their own port. That way you will have fantastic timing on all of them. Every synth can be made to sound on the same beat or note and they will all be super tight. I have only got 6 external devices so it works very well. The other two I use to feed a digital mixer and an Apple laptop.
The Roland Unit also looks excellent all be it more expensive option but if I was to buy a current unit this would be the way I would go. I have read some excellent reviews on it and they have some excellent technology which improves midi timing very much so it is also a great unit.
post edited by Jeff Evans - 2012/02/19 16:37:12