A or B

Peter Korsten peter at severity-one.com
Wed Apr 1 01:22:53 CEST 2015


Andrew Tarpinian schreef op 31-3-2015 om 21:58:
> I would get the motu as I am the opposite, it’s been over 10 years since I had a PCI card. Coincidentally I’ve had an 828MKII for over 10 years :)

But it's PCI Express (PCIe), not PCI, so that makes a bit of a 
difference. If it were PCI, it would be a non-starter, just go for the 
MotU. Now, the difference is a bit more subtle and it really depends on 
what you want to do with it.

I'd say that the advantage of the MotU is that you have a single cable 
between your audio rack and your computer, instead of a bunch of flimsy 
ADAT cables going into the back of a computer, which probably already 
has a whole bunch of cables coming out.

The advantage of the RME would be far less CPU load, although I haven't 
really kept up with PCIe technology, so for all I know Intel could have 
invented something wonderful so that your CPU isn't wasting cycles on 
USB devices. But somehow I doubt that.

USB seems a little more future-proof: I've seen the first USB devices 
over 20 years ago (actually, just two years after PCI was introduced), 
and the interface is still more or less the same.

Purely on gut feeling, I'd go for the MotU, provided that there aren't 
any issues with the drivers. With the exception of gaming graphics 
cards, expansion board are becoming a thing of the past, except for very 
specialised applications. Which yours might just be, but unlike RAID or 
Fibre Channel boards, you have the alternative of using USB.

- Peter


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