Behringer ADA8000

[Chickenjohn]

I've recently got one of these and am thinking of posting a review on it. Anyone want to hear what its like??

[Robin Lemaire]

I also recently got one but have only had the chance to use it a few times. So far I'd say good but unremarkable. Does what it should really.

How do you eat yours?

[Michael Harrison]

CJ, thanks; I'd be interested in hearing. I believe Digipenguin (who has been conspicuously AWOL recently...) also bought one recently and was intending to report back.

Mike

[PWGLE]

I'm quite tempted by one myself, and would be intereted to hear your thoughts!

Take care, Laurence

[Dishpan]

CJ, feedback would be welcome m8

What you running it with?

[Dishpan]

So did it blow up, or are you having such a good time you can't leave it long enough to stick a review up?

[Dishpan]

?

[Chickenjohn]

?

Sorry, having too much fun playing with the trolls!;)

But seriously, I see this review as being posted in four main parts:-

1. Introduction.
2. Initial Impressions.
3. More thorough test
4. Actually using it to record one of my bands.

I may even illustrate with MP3's posted to the web. First two installments to be posted this weekend, and preliminary research for the 3rd part may be carried out this weekend- however, its hard pinning my bands down to a definite "demo date".

[Dishpan]

Great stuff

> however, its hard pinning my bands down to a definite "demo date"

Oh yes, I know exactly how that feels

[Chickenjohn]

Introduction-

Behringer ADA8000- what is it? and what does it do?

Its an 8 channel analogue to digital and digital to analogue converter that connects to the digital domain via ADAT 8 channel lipe pipe for both input and output.

It has 8 mic pre-amps, phantom power, very basic metering (just signal and clip lights) and 8 line input sockets. Sync lights, on/off switch, universal phantom power switch.

On the back of the unit are the eight line outs on balanced or unbalanced (??) XLR's, a sync section comprising a switch that can go between master or slave, master- 44.1 or 48khz internal, slave- word clock external and ADAT in. There is a word clock socket too. And finally, ADAT input and output light pipe sockets.

Sadly, you cannot route the analogue ins directly to the analogue outs for monitoring the recorded signal.

The idea is you use the ADA8000 with another recording device that has ADAT lightpipe in/out, this giving an extra 8 channels of analogue to digital I/O. The ADA 8000 can work at sample rates of up to 48KHz and up to 24 bit. As I use 44.1khz and 24 bit its just the job.

Initial impressions.

Its quite a solid/tough feeling piece of kit, thickly made of what feels and looks like Aluminium plate construction. The knobs and switches look quite simmilar to those on my MOTU 896 and sitting next to the MOTU in my modest rack, it looks more like a MOTU extension device than a £150 cheapie next to a £1000 box!

First use

I needed to overdub a guitar solo onto a demo recorded previously through my MOTU 896. It was a question and answer type solo where the other guitarist does a break, then I do one then him again, then me again.

The other guitarist had recorded his solo via my Line 6 POD directly into the analogue line IN of the MOTU 896. I recorded my solo via the analogue line in of the Behringer ADA8000. The results, rather pleasingly, are that its impossible to tell which guitar breaks were recorded through MOTU converters and which used the Behringer ADA8000! So the converters pass the first test! The ADA8000 synced easily to the MOTU's clock via ADAT at 44.1khz, I experienced no glitches, noises or other problems. The lack of metering on the Behringer in my case was not a problem as I was able to use the spare 8 LED meters on the 896 by setting the 896 control panel to monitor ADAT in on the 8 extra LED meters.

The only drawback was that I was unable to hardware monitor my guitar playing via the MOTU, so I had to set Logic to software monitoring to hear my guitar playing as I recorded it. However, as Logic Pro on OSX is capable of very low latency, this worked out fine and I was able to play some fast licks without experiencing any monitor latency problems.
This is actually an issue with the MOTU unit and not really the Behringer, although it would be nice to be able to route the ADA8000 analogue ins to the analogue outs directly, thus enabling other signal monitoring possibillities.

Next test is possibly a tougher one- Vocal and acoustic guitar recording- comparing the pre's of the ADA8000 to those of the 896, and final chapter will be an (up to 16 track simultaneous tracking) demo recording of one of my bands.

So far the ADA8000 is looking somewhat of a bargain for the price and pretty decent quality too. It also looks quite professional in my rack- the shape of the knobs and black paint goes with the MOTU 896 and the silver rack cheeks match the Lacie Firewire drive below.

So far I'm very pleased. BTW, I bought this unit purely on the strength of Paul Whites review, as I trust his judgement and its not possible to try these units out here in the wilds of East Kent. Thanks Paul and SOS, another good bit of advice.

I'll post the results of the next tests when I have time!

[hogberto]

hey chickenjohn, thanks for the review.

i'm planning to go down the firewire route fairly soon.

i've got a load of modules and keyboards to manage, and i'm thinking that the motu 828 and the ada8000 might just be the dream solution.

the whole business of ada conversion is total gobbledygook to me so i'm reassured by your review that i seem to be thinking along the right tracks.

if it's good enough for paul white it's good enough for me

[Creature Studios]

Hey John, great review- keep up the good work- i've also had the unit now for over 3 months and also bought it on the strength of Paul Whites review. I must say that for the money it is extremely impressive. Im using it next to my Motu 828MKII Firewire and it really looks the part in the rack- i used it recently to record a live band using all 18 inputs and i really couldn't hear much of a difference in the sound. All in all if you have the budget for it then it's probably the best purchase you can make at the moment!

[Travis St. Hubbins]

A freind of mine used one as part of a budget mobile rig and said that it suffered from excessive channel bleed at high gain levels. Any truth in this?

[CSarge]

Nice review!

I bought two of these a while ago and I've recorded 16 tracks at once into an RME9636 in a 2.4PC at very low latency (6ms)simultaneously with out any problems at all.

There's a lot of bad stuff said about Behringer sometimes but you can't knock what you get for the money. All I wanted was a box with 8 mic pre's and a digital out - the next best thing is about 4 times the price!

Admittedly I haven't got a higher end a/d to compare to but y'know!

I've not noticed any bleed.

[SiG]

I'm using two hooked up to an RME Fireface and they work a treat.No thrills but a decent uncoloured sound.Highly recommended...and I usually steer clear of the infamous "B" gear.

Cheers SiG

[Spacehog]

I have three of these connected to my RME HDSP9652, and they work a treat. The card, the ADA's, and the Alesis M1 Mk2's have improved my audio setup and sound quality a hundredfold for considerably less than my previous recording setup cost me.

[ghellquist]

I found an odd thing by mistake today. I ran a session at 96kHz and the ADA8000 happily sent along a signal. It seems like it works OK in my system set to 96kHz, although it only sends along four channels as expected.

I use a MOTU 828mkII set to internal clock. The ADA is synched to the MOTU using a wordclock cable (with termination) which I believe is the key to the whole thing.

As ADAT only allows 4 channels at 96kHz that is all I see in the Motu. An odd twist is that the four last channels of mic pres from the ADA are summed into channel four. Channel 1 to 3 is separate.

What might happen is that the ADA really is not running 96kHz from some reason, and that the Motu does the adding. I would not be surprised though if the converters actually do run at 96kHz, it would be sort of typical.

If there will be any long term effects, such as things overheating or whatever I will not venture to guess.

Gunnar.

[Michael Harrison]

That is curious. I wonder if Hugh or Paul (or any others posessing near-infinite knowledge ) would care to comment on this.

The part that intrigues me is this: IIRC, ADAT isn't restricted to 4 channels at 96kHz; ADAT doesn't work at all at 96kHz - its the SMUX capability found on much ADAT-equipped gear that allows double data rate - I have straightforward ADAT gear which doesn't allow any sample rates other than 44.1 or 48 kHz.

Odd...

Mike

[ghellquist]

To further on the 96k capability.

True, on-spec ADAT does not support higher speed than 48k. But the de-facto standard goes down to 4 channels at above 48k, there is a lot of various equipment that does not. Maybe this standard has another name, I am not very knowledgeable in this and not aware of that.

The reason I am not really surprised is that the Behringer people most probably has used some off-the-shelf ADAT chip. I would expect modern chips to be able to output to the four-channel mode of lighpipe at 96k and perhaps even at the 2 channel mode at 192k. But there would probably be need for some special circuitry around the chip to switch things around for that 4 channel mode, and to keep the price down on a very price sensitive market segment they left that out.

Perhaps someone who understands this kind of thing can check out what chip there is and check with the chip manufacturer data sheets.

Anyway, it is only a curiosity.

Gunnar

[Spacehog]

I've just tested this on my RME HDSP Hammerfall, and it seems that the ADA8000 sums channels 1 and 5, 2 and 6, 3 and 7, and 4 and 8, although I could be wrong. Seems to work ok in brief tests in Sonar, although further tests are required... if it works it'll be wonderful news as it'll save me buying a load of new convertors (I already had the ADA8000's when I bought the HDSP as I'd been using them purely as analogue mic preamps before this).

[Chickenjohn]

A quick update- I've used it in anger to add up to 6 tracks of simultaneous recording to the 8 tracks of my MOTU 896, and it went very well.

I'll post more details later, and possibly some audio clips!

[ghellquist]

Update on my test of 96kHz. My recommendation is to stay away from it. The effect seems to be that every second sample comes from channel 1 and every second from channel 5. So stay off it, that will create some very weird results.

It sort of makes sense if you accept that the ADA keeps sampling at 48kHz (the circuits will not go to 96kHz if I still understand how to read manufacturers data sheets). It then sends out all eight channels in sequence before starting again. The receiving end expects channel 1 to 4 repeated. So the first "pass" will be channel 1 to 4, and the second pass it expects channel 1 to 4 again, but will actually get channel 5 to 8. This will sound like the channel 1 and 5 is summed and so on.

Sorry for raising this thing, sort of part of my learning curve for ADAT equipment.

In short, DONT sample higher then 48kHz with the ADA.

And for the price it does remarkably well. I will not use it on my main mics if I can avoid it, but for various backings and ambience mics when I have run out of channels, it does do the job.

Gunnar

[Spacehog]

Thanks for the update, advice duly noted. I passed the 96kHz thing as a suggested improvement to the people at Behringer, they said they'd pass it on to their product development guys. FWIW I'm looking to get another couple of ADA8000's anyway to up my IO count to 40 channels (my band seems to be accumulating a lot of gear at the moment, and as there are 7 of us, that means a lot of possible input channels, and it's always good to save repatching stuff where possible), it doesn't have a "special" sound, it's just very transparent sounding. Which is great, IMO, as that's precisely what I want!

[neonknight]

I have used ADA 8000 to record 16 tracks of 16 bit/44.1 KHz of simultaneous audio hooked to MOTU 828 MKII, never had any problems with it, the sound is transparent, but I don't think you can get anything like this for this money...

[skinrapt]

Here's a test report on the ADA8000:

http://audiorail.home.comcast.net/ADA8000.htm