"I thought I would take a minute to let you know how great this Focusrite Octopre is. I find that I am getting clear, natural sounds more often with little or no EQ necessary. And the overly simple one knob compressor/limiter is surprisingly intuitive, providing an ideal first step for input to digital sound cards, which are notoriously bad at handling hot transient signals. The performance of this thing is not hype. Eight great sounding mic pre's and eight useable compressors in a unit at this price point is hard to beat. I would not hesitate to recommend this unit to other customers. I used the instrument input on the Octopre for a bass guitar tracking session the other day. The bass player (Dave Smith, who has played on numerous albums from Buddy Guy to Johnny Lang) liked the bass sound so much that he is now checking into buying one of your Trak Master units as a recording session bass pre amp. So, when you make quality products and sell them at a fair price, there is definitely a word-of-mouth domino effect among real life, down-in-the-trenches players and engineers. I have other mic pre's by other manufacturers, and now with the addition of this Octopre I have completely eliminated the need to go through the board during tracking, resulting in cleaner, punchier tracks. Based on the performance of this unit, I would like to eventually add other Focusrite products as budget permits." Steven Wenger, River City Sound Productions, Memphis TN "This is the first recording I have done with these units and I must say they sound really good with a lot of headroom! I work as an engineer at Swedish national radio and normally we record live music using a mobile truck using SSL 4k+ desk, but I can’t hear any obvious difference between the SSL and the Octopres, I just loaded up the work in my DAW and it sounds punchy clean and warm." Henrik – Sweden "I received this gear last night along with the ADAT Option card to run with my Digi 002R. The card installation was a snap following the clear instructions included. I plugged it up with the optical cable to the digi and was tracking in minutes. It has great sounding pre's and 8 of them at that. A nice touch is the high pass filter and compression on the face plate. I have had no problems using this gear, it opened my Digi002R to 18 track input capability. Definitely worth the $$$$. Great job on this piece." John Gogan, June 2005 "This thing sounds GREAT. Very warm and clear. I bought the digital I/O card and pump it into my FW-1884. It couldn't be easier to use or sound better without spending 5 times the price. I was really concerned that for basically 125 per channel I'd get cheesy pre's... not the case. Class A stuff. Highly recommended." Kirk Fischer, June 2005 "I bought one of these along with the Multiple I/O (digital) option to use as a front end into my Digi 002R for live applications. I go into the OctoPre and out to the 002R's optical in via lightpipe. This unit is perfect! A couple nights ago I had to record without a sound check, and I had my levels set 1/2 way through the first song. The controls on the OctoPre are very simple and intuitive. But I've also ended up using this as a clean set of pres into my Pro Tools TDM system in my studio! An unexpected benefit, and I have happier clients. I can't find anything this good anywhere near the price." Tom Pollock (Pine Ridge Studio) June 2005 "Just purchase two Octopre's and put them to the test the other night. The session was just a practice for a local band, and I recorded the first half with the mixer preamps and the second half with the Octopre. I couldn't believe the difference between the two preamps. I'm going to save up and purchase one more unit to be able to record all 24 tracks with Octopre. Just wanted to let you know how happy it made me to finally hear such an improvement in something that I recorded (the band didn't sound that great). Paul Harrison – USA "The OctoPre was excellent! I used it on the drums and vocals and found the compressor section very usable and controllable without having to think too much, which is always handy at a festival!" Geoff Pryce - Chief Engineer "I love the warm gooey Octo... I bought a nice Midas Venice 240 for their excellent pre's, but spent too much and realised I still only had 8 outs to my 888... I sold it and bought the Octo's and digital cards" Jason Novak, Manga Video/Palm Pictures, USA As a service provider for mobile productions we are involved in live recordings for broadcast and cd productions. Two OctoPre are used mostly for input expansion for our Yamaha desks and for direct recordings without mixer. Regarding our new OBvan with two DM2000 desks we are planning to expand our OctoPre inventory. The units providing on smallest room and for a very attractive price a very high functionality. The OctoPre is small, leight-weighted and 96 kHz compatible - if external remote of the parameters is not needed we think that there isn't an alternative in this price region." Stefan Heinen, StudioMagazin November 2002