I've had the FF about a month now. About the tango. Hmmmm. I hook things up in hiearchy of importance. I guess as far as difficulty to record. As I develop and add pre's in importance. Learning what seems to work on which instruments best. I can say that everything in general just sounds way better. Maybe that's a lot to do with the Firefaces DA and I gotta say I've been converted to the concept of better clocking. I monitor with Yamaha NS10's and a subwoofer in my control room. Headphone amps (Rane) are coming off the FF D/A's
So going through the Tango has been the Bass rig. Useing an Aphex Tubessence 107 (not highly regarded I guess by some). The bass is a Washburn, to a Countryman DI for the direct out of the bass and then splits to Peavey Mark VI Bass amp with the 2-15 Peavey Black widow cab. Miced with an Electrovoice RE20. I was commenting to the bassist that I thought the bass was sounding some of the best in the last recordings. He agreed it sounded very authentic and natural. I choose no other mic any more then the RE20 for bass. It just has a beautiful sound and makes recording bass easy. The RE20 captures the full range and gets the real natural sound while with the DI; I blend in just as much as I need to get the low end and fatten it up. It's usually 2/3 mic and 1/3 DI.
I hadn't really stop untill now to think about which things were plugged into which A/D (after initially hooking everything up) so yeah even the Tango is sounding better. Clocking, Fireface D/A ??? probably both. I will also say that the Tango has always been completely a no brainer to hook up and use. You have to open the lid and move jumpers around the get +4 or -10. All the controls you need and just comes up recognized by the host unit.
Also the kick is coming up here on the Tango through a mod I did on my Mackie board awhile back that lets me use the first 8 channels as separate preamps. If you engage the channel mute button it no longer goes out the master buss but out the individual insert out only. This works for those 1st eight channels only. It's like getting a whole bunch of extra preamps for near nothing. The mic is an AKG D550; sometimes I use a Shure Beta 52 instead. Then through an FMR RNC compressor. Subwoofer in my monitoring system lets me here how much level I'm getting as far as low end. Seems to be a good signal. The overall balance of the elements I do are played live against each other so that's kind of self balancing.
My band is a traditional Rock band. So we're not into the super sub low bass; that would be to much and out of character for our sound. I agree with some of the opinions that I see on the net about the kick; that if more people were using a subwoofer they would realize how much low end they were adding and that the kick drum sound is really being represented and able to be mixed a lot more then some would realize. Instead of building this monstrous sub low kick only to carve it away and fight to fit it in. That's a different style of music from what we do.
Tango's coverter qualities in comparison to Apogee or others. I'm not one to comment with a great degree about. Although over the years I've been involved with a lot of studio's most were always based on Tape. Of the last 5 years I've been lost in my own self production hell. So I really do hear directly whether I like what I hear here or not and I've got to say that with the Fireface day by day a sense of relief has come over me that I'm finally happy with the sound quality. The vocals, electric gtr amps, drums, acoustic guitar sounds like a veil has been lifted. If it gets better then this then it really is "it's all good".
What else the Mackie Submixing returns / CD players / cassettes etc. into the Tango. Again no complaints seems to be fine and detailed. Tango D/A is going out sends to the Reverb units, Little Labs Reamp, PA monitors cabs. I can't see any problems at this point the sum total is what I'm noticing and it sounds dam good. Moving from using a Digi 001 here all I can say is the sound quality has moved into the hugely satisfied category and was more then worth the money. Again also the direct routing inputs to output for the no latency thing has removed a lot of issues in the monitoring.
I do plan to add another set of converters of higher quality into the 3rd adat i/o at some point but I don't feel panicked about getting it done. It's just my project studio and I am purposely trying to keep my input track counts to something that is easy to manage. I consider my sounds here with my guitars and amps to be A+ (drummer & drums A+ also) so I know that to be most important. My nexus is ergonomic and mixerless with controllers instead and automating so I get to interactively play and record without thinking about it. Which has been achieved also. It sure took a long time but it was ultimately finite and not infinite. I have form and function under control. Now it's just parts that can be changed and upgraded.
Sorry if I diverted but just felt like commenting. I don't post often but I lurk here and at ProSound daily. Hugely informative. Priceless really.
