Just because I have a studio now doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned my mobile recording rig. Quite the opposite. I’m still doing occasional live recordings for Ho Etsu Taiko, and they had a very special concert this weekend featuring Suzuki Sensei, an expert in Edo Bayashi, an early form of Japanese drummming from which taiko was born. For the show I decided to have my MOTU 896HD upgraded with Black Lion Audio. They mod a lot of MOTU and Focusrite interfaces by replacing the op amp ICs. And I especially like the 896 for live recordings, because each XLR in has an XLR out, so you can easily route eight channels straight back out to use as live sound reinforcement.
So I got the 896 back from Black Lion the day before the show, but they hadn’t put a Black Lion sticker on it, like I’d seen on my friend Sarah’s Focusrite 18i20, so I thought I’d open it up to check they’d done anything. Sure enough, the five op-amp ICs (two inputs share an IC, and there’s one on the main outs) were now Burr-Brown OPA2134PAs. But upon screwing the lid back on I managed to catch one of the wires that runs from the power supply onto the motherboard, on the screw, and grounded it to the chassis. When I turned it on, it popped, smelled like burning and would give me nothing but 60 cycle hum on all channels.
Cursing my stupidity, I hastily arranged a different rig using my 828 (where’s my MOTU endorsement already?) and some separate preamps (the 828 still has the same routing, but only two mic ins). Luckily it was just the power supply that I’d fried, so I bought a broken 896 on ebay for $60 and switched them out. That’ll learn me.
Chuck's Vegetable Stand 