I have to Octa and love it .  A few of the features I thought I would not really use or care about are some of my favorites now:  The auto-sense input levels is really nice, and generally dead on, and the monitoring effects (reverb for tracking) is extremely easy to use and very helpful.  

I have even started using a touch of the compression on bass tracks on the way in, and it sounds great.  

I can track with super low latency (I keep it set at 128 most of the time while tracking, but can go down if necessary)


I know RME is great, but for the price, I'm not sure you can beat the Octa.

Thanks guys , some very interesting answers there. 

I do use a fair amount of virtual inst, such as steven slate drums, garritan strings, plus all the x1 bundled stuff, so a playable latency is important to me. I only have a home studio so im not sure i would notice the audio quality difference in the RME that is indeed if there is one and at £750 instead of just over £500 for the Octa, im not sure thats justifiable, when i can probably spend the difference in ££ making my signal chain better quality elsewhere.

I would actually like to do away with my huge mixing desk, as i have no real need for it, so the octa seems like an ideal solution. Real shame it only has one headphone ouptput tho

Bibs

rme babyface for me!

yeah the babyface is kick ass, and so is the Octa offerings

Lance

jkleban


I too have OCTApus... works great for me... latency is a problem for me but not because of the OCTA... working in PURE audio the thing screams....  working with VSTs ON (I have UAD2) is an issue when I try to track a VSTi instrument but like I said, this issue has ZERO to do with the OCTA.

You get a lot of bang for the buck but if you have external MIC Pre's, there is no way to bypass the PREs of the OCTA..

I have the quad capturer . I use my focusrite pre's via the digital connection..Coaxial 

Hadn't considered the babyface, looks good!

Babyface is awesome man-

Lance

Tascam US-1800 here. 8 XLRs and 6 jacks = 14 analog inputs. Very good pre's, low noise and uncomplicated to use.

How is the low latency performance on the Tascam? That is a huge factor.

Lance

I use Sonar like a tape recorder and latency has never been an issue.

If you could tell me how one measures it, I'll try find out. Does it have to do with the smallest buffer samples count before breakup?