MOTU has announced that its redesigned 828es audio interface is now shipping.

New in the 828es, renowned ESS Sabre32 DAC technology delivers 123dB dynamic range and the same proven, award-winning audio quality as MOTU’s flagship 1248.

The 828es delivers 60 total channels of I/O, 48-channel mixing and 32-bit floating point DSP effects processing.

New control room features appearing for the first time on a MOTU interface include a built-in talkback mic with front panel “talk” button and “A/B” monitor select, mute and sum-to-mono buttons for the main outs.

Advanced extras, incorporated from MOTU’s flagship 1248 interface, include ESS™ Sabre32 Ultra™ DAC technology with 123 dB dynamic range, ultra low round trip latency (RTL) performance as low as 1.6 ms at 96 kHz over Thunderbolt (and 1.9 ms over USB), USB audio class compliant firmware for connection to iOS™ devices (with a standard camera adapter, sold separately), convenient web app control from any mobile computing device, flexible matrix-style routing and splitting, stand alone mixing with Wi-Fi control and AVB-TSN audio networking for system expansion.

Numerous features brought forward from the award-winning 828x model include pre-converter sends for the two mic inputs, dedicated quarter-inch time code input and output jacks, MIDI in and out jacks, BNC word clock I/O, a foot switch input for hands free talkback or punch-in during recording, AudioDesk workstation software and a suite of audio analysis apps.

Housed in a sturdy, aluminum alloy chassis (one rack space), the 828es provides 28 inputs and 32 outputs, including two redesigned mic/guitar “combo” style inputs featuring high quality, transparent preamps with front panel control (and remote software control) of individual gain/pad/48V phantom power. The hi-Z quarter-inch sockets on the combo jacks provide amp-like performance when plugging in a guitar. Additional I/O includes eight balanced (TRS) analog in/out (with DC coupled outputs), separate main outs on XLR jacks, two banks of 8-channel optical I/O (switchable to stereo TOSLink), RCA S/PDIF digital I/O and two independent front panel headphone jacks with volume controls.