Good info Jeff, thanks for that. 
 
gabo

rme babyface would be perfect

gbowling
 
Good point. Although there aren't many with both In/Out. Even the RME octamic XTC which is 3x the price of most of the boxes mentioned, only has ADAT out and bnc word clock in/out. 
 
gbow 

 
The XTC has ADAT I/O, MADI I/O & AES I/O.  It also has the ability to be controlled directly in Total Mix from the UFX and is a great D/D format converter.  It is what I use, now with a UFX+, and it does an excellent job. 
 
On some source material, it may be hard to tell the difference between a Behringer Pre or Focusrite, or Audient & RME.  Especially if the mics and monitoring are not up to snuff.  But RME and Audient can provide noticeably better quality in the right circumstance. 

rumleymusic
 
 
On some source material, it may be hard to tell the difference between a Behringer Pre or Focusrite, or Audient & RME.  Especially if the mics and monitoring are not up to snuff.  But RME and Audient can provide noticeably better quality in the right circumstance. 

 
Don't agree. Very few circumstances and not so noticeable especially where the mics are great and the monitoring is great.  In fact in those situations it might be harder to tell.  The mics and the source material rule.  Mic Pres are very very good these days.  A lot better than they once were. 
 
I agree though comparing the Behringer to the XTC which is an excellent product for sure.  (Major difference in price though) Not sure about Focusrite compared to Audient though.  They are similarly priced and featured and I would imagine much closer than you think.  
  
I recently did a classical solo piano recording with the Focusrite Pres (Clarett) and they sounded beautiful.  Even compared to RME Mic Pres.  Which are also excellent of course. 

The Focusrite liquid channels sound awesome.

RME is great.

Audient is solid but not perfect. I'd rather have an RME xtc.

The Audient asp880 I got has an impedance switch per channel. Idk if I can actually hear much difference on these other than gain.

Low pass per channel is a nice to have, but I have it on the RME anyway.

Mine had tons of noise near the nyquist frequency when I got it. I had to send it for repair twice before they got the right firmware properly installed.

In general it is a pretty cool interface though.

I had not looked at the focusrite clarett octapre prior to the suggestion here. It's been updated recently and the new specs on it are actually quite a bit better than the audient asp800. Noise floor of 118db vs 112db for the asp800 among other things. For approx $300 less than the asp800 it might be the right way to go if I'm going for the lower cost units. The big benefit of the asp800 is the iron and hmx settings, however I don't know how much I would use those. I tend to prefer recording a clean signal and doing things to it in sonar instead of "burning in" the FX.
 
As for the XTC, yes that is still something I'm considering. The operation with totalmix is an excellent point. Totalmix is really excellent and of course is used with my UFX so I'm already trained on how to use it. The XTC would clearly be a long term winner, but based on comments here it's becoming hard to justify the approx 4x price over the octapre.
 
Thanks, gabo

Gabo, the main reason I would like the xtc is the auto level. I find this incredibly useful and predictable.

Any ADAT interface will come into TotalMix, so from my point of view there isn't much advantage there. The only TotalMix feature you lose with a different make is gain control.

The AIR switches on the Focusrite are I am pretty sure very similar to IRON in that they are simulations of a transformer signal path.  It is available on all 8 channels.  It adds top end to the sound and in some cases it is nice to have and use.  Recently I found it was a little too much on drum overheads making them a tad bright.  Or at least with the Mics I was using at the time.  I found a good thing to do is a little test recording with and without AIR to see which is a good match for the source. The pres are perfectly flat and transparent with AIR switched off. 
 
I see the Magnetic saturation on the Audient is working in the analog domain which is interesting. The Focusrite is also doing this in the analog domain. They are changing the input impedance and therefore altering the relationship between the microphone output impedance and the Mic Pre input impedance.

do you need more than 2 preamps?

gswitz
Any ADAT interface will come into TotalMix, so from my point of view there isn't much advantage there.

Ah, thanks for that, totally true as anything that comes into the UFX is going to show up in totalmix. An additional $1800 or so for auto level seems like more than it's worth at this point.
 
And yes I need more than 2 channels. I currently use all the line inputs and mic pres on the UFX (it has 12) and I need 4 or 5 more. And it has to be an ADAT capable unit as that's the only way I can get expansion. So I'm looking for a good quality 8 channel ADAT preamp. I'm willing to spend a little more for better quality, but I'm not sure about 4x for what seems to be a barely identifiable quality increase. For that additional $1800+ for something like the XTC or better there needs to be some fairly obvious improvements.
 
Thanks, gabo