At the price point you cant beat this thing. The preamps, the front panel options, the computer interface. Ive only had it about a week but its worked well with minor issues. Works with Windows 7 but you will have to change the firewire driver to the legacy driver. This is not a deal breaker but just so you know there is NOT A SOFTWARE MIXER. Driver are stable ASIO panel seems stable. I think im going to have some issues with monitoring via my recording software but again at this price point who care about miliseconds. Preamps sounds really good very clear unless driven to hard(tubes) No extra inputs sucks but again $$$. So yeah if you are looking at similar interfaces and this is in the list i say move it up to the top.

I purchased my TubeFire 8 because I was looking for lots of nice pleasant sounding preamps. Though I don't have a lot of hours racked up in recording, I've liked what I've heard over the last 14months. These tube preamps do not compress the sound as much as I expected they might (based on my use of ART's Tube MP's.) I wish it had light pipe outs so that I could use it with my Presonus FireStudio but it does not. I have to run both of them into my MOTU 24 I/O. The down side is that I've been having issues with it being used as a full time Digital to Analog for music playback. I've never had its audio cut out in tracking, but it often has cut out simply listening to my work in Windows Media Player. I prefer the warm pleasant sound of this unit over my Presonus FireStudio but it has had this issue as long as I've had it. If the glitch occurs during playback, the audio drops out then is followed by a half second of distorted loud noise while the ART Control Panel tells me that at that very second it is trying to lock and then carries on like nothing is wrong. (I've watched the whole cycle.) I've never had this problem with my FireStudio using the same cables & PC etc. I've updated drivers, uninstalled, re-installed, sent the unit in under warranty for test, repair, and updates etc. Their notes seemed to indicate they tested it for 3 hrs with no issues (I wasn't suprised.) I don't know what to attribute this to. It could be a pour driver, conflict with my PC (PC has been started over from scratch to fix this issue at least twice), product glitch, etc. My resolution like it or not has been to primarily use it for its preamps and not its DA conversion in spite of the fact I prefer its sound. All in all I'm looking forward to years of nice recording, even if I have to settle for using another piece of gear for my DA conversion.

The TubeFire was used to record a live album for an all-acoustic, high-energy band. The audio quality was outstanding from the TRS audio outs fed into an Alesis HD24XR. When using ribbon mics, the pre amps are clean, quiet (70dB of gain) and a wonderful playback experience. After 2 nights in the trenches, there were zero problems, just stunning detail captured from using mics every pro band has in their mic collection. In studio use has proved the TubeFire 8 to be even more impressive. After 30+ years as an audio professional, I have used many mic preamps and find the playback of recordings made with the TubeFire 8 to be amazing! With the $ saved I will add a few more TubeFire 8's to the studio and mobile setup. All I was looking for was a stand-alone 8-channel mic preamp with high-resolution audio (10 to 60k) from the TRS lineouts. I found it all in the TubeFire 8 plus I have a firewire audio interface. Did I mention these are class-A preamps? Or that the input/output controls are solid and offer precise level control along with differing tonal colors by varying their relative levels? Too cool! (one week later) I have been working on the edits, mixing and mastering for this project. I am quite impressed with the quality of the audio. Everything is clean and quiet with great detail. And I am even more impressed with the precise level controls. Between the input and the output control, you can dial in exactly where you need to be and that's no easy task when recording live. I will add another 8 channel preamps to my mobile rig, but not sure I can pass up the quality/price of the TubeFire 8. Sure makes for nice recordings.