MOTU OctaLite ships: eight mic preamps in a half-rack box

MOTU has started shipping the OctaLite, a USB-C audio interface with eight mic, line and instrument inputs in a half-rack case. The US price is $849.95.

Two combination XLR/TRS inputs sit on the front panel and six on the rear. Every channel has its own 48V phantom power switch, a 20dB pad, polarity inversion and up to 74dB of preamp gain. MOTU rates the mic inputs at 115dB A-weighted dynamic range and -129dBu equivalent input noise. Jim Cooper, MOTU's director of marketing, says it is the only interface on the market with eight mic preamps in a super-portable half-rack unit.

Mixing and loopback

The interface has its own DSP mixer with reverb, a four-band parametric EQ, compression and gating. The CueMix 5 app controls it from macOS, Windows and iOS, with separate mixes for the monitor outputs, headphones and loopback channels.

Three virtual mix buses are meant for streaming and podcasting. According to MOTU, the loopback channels send computer output plus a mix of the live inputs back to the host computer or iOS device, where it can be recorded in podcasting software or streamed to the internet.

Round-trip latency is 2ms over USB with MOTU's Mac and Windows drivers at 96kHz and a 32-sample buffer. On macOS and iOS no driver is needed.

Optical expansion

The OctaLite can also act as an eight-channel preamp for another interface or mixer over ADAT optical. It shares its mic input circuits with the UltraLite-mk5, so the two together give ten matching mic channels. MOTU names the 828 and 16A as other partners. Two OctaLites mounted side by side with the optional brackets put sixteen mic inputs in one rack space.

The output stage uses an ESS Sabre32 ES9026PRO converter, rated at 125dB A-weighted dynamic range and -114dB unweighted THD+N. The steel unit weighs 1.36kg. Performer Lite, Ableton Live Lite and 6GB of loops and sounds come in the box.

Source: MOTU