RME Fireface 802

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Quick question - does anyone have any experience with the RME Fireface 802 audio interface? If so, does it work well with Cantabile? Good latency etc? Reliable?

Thanks in advance!

Neil

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Hey Neil,

Donā€™t have the 802 (wish I did :disappointed_relieved: ) but the drivers for the Babyface Pro are the same so my WIN 10 experience with them has been solid. In general RME is great stuff in terms of latency, stability and durability. I run Ivory, B5 and Samplers layered at 128 samples with no pops or glitches FWIW. Average 45 to 65 C3 load with 3 big boys like described. I did have some crashes when I changed the audio ports while up and running, but upon restart all was well, me and Brad talked briefly about it and I submitted a report to RME who stated they didnā€™t think it was their drivers. Since it is rare I change audio port configs I have only had it happen a few times in 2 years of use. There may be other issues I havenā€™t encountered but thatā€™s what I can offer up.

Regards,

Dave

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Same as dave I donā€˜t have the 802 here but use 3 RME interfaces with C3: HDSP Multiface, Babyface and Fireface UFXII (Babyface & Fireface actually on Stage with 2 laptops in hot standby mode).

All of them run super stable and as far as I can tell with low latencies (I use really hevy stuff like divas, serums, big libraries, lots of stacking sounds and would be able to do 128 samples and high cpu load but decided to go the save route with 256 samples).

There were only 2 issues that ended in a crash of the drivers (interestingly fĆ¼r both if the USB interfaces):

  1. The meanwhile abandoned binding taget to Restart audio engine (quick!). This was a hack kindly introduced by Brad to get load balancing of cpu managed properly. Lateron Brad found out the implementation was not completely clean and sometimes let drivers crash in special situations. As this function is neither available nor needed any more: fixed

  2. A bad USB cable was a reason for crashes. Using high quality cables & fixing USB plugs mechanically fixed this.

Since not a single problem.

Regards, humphrey

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Hey @Neil_Durant,

no direct experience with the 802, but Iā€™ve had a Fireface 800 in my studio for years, then replaced it with a Fireface UFX, and my live rig is built around a Babyface. I can only say good things about RME interfaces - in my personal opinion, they have the best drivers in the industry with absolutely rock-solid performance and minimal latency. Matthias Carstens (RME mastermind) is absolutely obsessed with technical quality - and it shows!

After some disappointments and nasty surprises with my MOTU Ultralite, I changed my live rig to the Babyface plus an ADAT D/A converter (Behringer ADA 8200) for more outputs, and I havenā€™t had any issues with the setup yet - none!

So I donā€™t think youā€™ll be making a mistake in getting the 802 for your live rig.

BTW: my backup and ā€œsmallā€ rig alternative is the Zoom UAC-2 - also great low-latency performance, but does need a bit of a kick (unplug - re-plug) now and then to get going. Especially its configuration micro-switches are a bit fidgety - you sometimes find it re-configured after pulling it out of the gig bag - good for surprisesā€¦

Cheers,

Torsten

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Thanks all, great feedback!! I love this forum!!

@Torsten Iā€™d forgotten about being able to use the ADAT outputs for extra channels - that could be really useful!

Neil

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Itā€™s been a while since Iā€™ve posted here but Iā€™m going to add another big thumbs up for RME. In my case, Iā€™ve been running a Fireface UFX for a number of years and it has been rock solid with everything I use it with including Cantabile.
Latency is very low, build quality is superb and so too is the audio quality.

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Thanks all, you persuaded me, and I got one :slight_smile:

Neil

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