The FW-1884 is a FireWire interface for Mac or Windows based computer workstations and combines a professional control surface, an 18x18 Audio Interface, 4x4 MIDI I/O and professional control surface into a single box. The unit has touch-sensitive moving faders, 96kHz audio capability, native and HUI emulation modes and more. For larger studios the system can be expanded with FE-8 expansion modules.
The touch sensitive 100mm moving faders are smooth and quiet. Large transport keys, brightly lit buttons and indicators and logical pod arrangements of control groups make this surface a pleasure to work on. The FW-1884 audio interface offers eight high quality microphone preamps (with phantom power,) balanced analog line ins and outs and digital I/O on ADAT optical and SPDIF coax. For high sample rate recording the converters deliver 24-bit/96kHz resolution. The 4x4 MIDI interface has activity LEDs present for each port to provide verification of routing.
The FW-1884 can also be used as a stand-alone 18x2 mixer in MON MIX mode. The primary benefit of MON MIX mode is to provide a means of monitoring audio inputs in a zero-latency environment. By using MON MIX mode to monitor the audio from the inputs along with the audio return from the DAW application, it is possible to overdub tracks to the DAW software with none of the audio processing delays inherent in DAW applications.