I just picked up one of these for $200 on eBay, brand new, still in the box. I know, it's not the newest fanciest thing on the market, but I have pretty moderate needs and probably don't need the features some of the higher-priced units offer.

This unit was released in September 2003, so it's been around for a while. I read a lot of reviews and user comments before deciding to buy it. The main complaint I heard was that the drivers for the Mac were simply not very good. Unstable, unpredictable, and downright unusable. Those comments seem to have fallen by the wayside; most of the more recent comments I've found find the unit, and its drivers, doing a very good job. So I took the plunge and picked one up.

First things first. You must install the drivers before the unit is connected to the host computer. Not "maybe" do the driver install first -- you MUST do the driver install first! The unit itself is a little finicky about how it's hooked up. It really wants to be plugged in while the host computer is turned off. There's a bright red piece of paper that came with my unit warning me NOT to hot-plug the unit in while the computer is on, due to the possibility that the Firewire 410, the computer, or both, could be damaged in the process. Not exactly friendly talk, especially for a Firewire device... I hot plug Firewire hard drives, external DVD-R enclosures, and Firewire hubs all the time with no issues. But I have no desire to damage my hardware either, so I'm complying with this safety request. So I installed the drivers on my G4 Mac Mini, 1GB RAM. No issues. Shut down the computer, hooked up the 410 via one of its two Firewire ports. Let me state here that I have a very messy Firewire setup. First, the Firewire port on my Mini is connected to an external drive enclosure with 2 additional Firewire ports and a 160GB drive. This is my boot drive as the 80GB laptop drive in the Mini itself just isn't fast enough for my needs. There's an additional Firewire hard drive enclosure connected to the first enclosure, and my new Firewire 410 is plugged into the first enclosure as well. Once I had the Firewire connections hooked up, I ran a coaxial S/PDIF cable from the S/PDIF out on the 410 to my bi-amped Roland monitors. I figure hey, I have all this digital equipment, I might as well go all-digital with no analog stuff in the mix to add interference.

I fired up the Mini, let it boot, and after logging in, it immediately recognized the Firewire 410 that was connected, and started updating the firmware in the unit. Nice touch. Went to System Prefs -> Sound to set the main audio output to the Firewire 410. After that, I fiddled around with it for a while, but couldn't quite get it to make any noise! I figured maybe a reboot would help after the firmware updating, so I rebooted. This seemed to do the trick, as I was seeing level meters moving on the unit, and the control panel mixer was showing some activity. Still no sound, though. Turns out I needed to set the S/PDIF output to coaxial; it defaults to optical. That did the trick, and now I have sound!

The sound quality is very good; maybe a little bright but very, very clean and airy. The Firewire 410 handles pretty much everything that I need in my small home studio: 2 line inputs, 2 XLR inputs for microphones, 2 headphone outputs, S/PDIF in and out, and lots of flexible routing options. I don't as yet have a practical need for 10 discrete outputs, but I can do all sorts of fun things by running 8 separate channel outs to my 8-channel analog mixer, then playing with everything from there. I can plug my electric guitars directly into one of the Neutrik combo plugs (XLR + 1/4 inch inputs on the same connector) and route it directly into Ableton Live (my chosen audio workstation app), or into Native Instruments' Guitar Rig software. For me, the Firewire 410 will do pretty much everything that I need, and not a lot that I don't. It sounds great, it has lots of flexibility, and offers very close to zero latency for monitoring. Hopefully it will be stable and reliable over the long term, but for now, I'm hooked.