MOTU 4pre USB / FireWire Audio Interface (2024)

Quality Sound Meets Maximum Convenience!

Portability, flexibility, and convenient simplicity - MOTU's 4pre hybrid recording interface gives you all of this and more. Whether you have a FireWire-equipped Mac laptop or a PC tower with USB ports, recording with your MOTU 4pre couldn't be easier. Like the name suggests, the 4pre sports four studio-quality microphone preamplifiers. What's more, each input features a combo jack, giving you inputs for your mics, instruments, and line-level sources. And housed in a handy all-metal half-rack chassis, the MOTU 4pre is ready to go where the music takes you.

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MOTU 4pre Hybrid USB/FireWire Interface at a Glance:

• Total modular flexibility
• Studio-grade sound
• Flexible integrated mix engine
• Control CueMix with your iPad

Total modular flexibility

Do you prefer a handy desktop interface, or do you need an on-the-go solution for mobile recording? Either way, the MOTU 4pre will easily accommodate your needs. High-speed USB 2.0 lets you connect the 4pre to any computer out there, and if your laptop has FireWire onboard, then you can even bus power it for convenient mobile recording. What's more, the 4pre comes with a complete rackmounting kit, so you can mount it in a half-width rack, or link it with another half-rack-size MOTU piece and rackmount them together.

Studio-grade sound

Of course, no audio interface is worth investing in unless it sounds good. One of the reasons Sweetwater stands by MOTU gear is simply this: the customers who buy their products almost always rave about their sound. Specifically, the 4pre comes equipped with (as the name suggests) four of MOTU's top-quality microphone preamplifiers. What's great about these preamps is that their incredibly clear, with extremely low noise or distortion. That lets you records anything from vocals to high-gain guitar amps, and tweak the tone to taste later.

Flexible integrated mix engine

Here's another thing that Sweetwater customers love about MOTU gear. The CueMix FX mixing software lets you fully tweak the 4pre's 8-bus mix engine down at the hardware level - way before the signal reaches your DAW. That's right, we said an 8-bus mix engine. This lets you control the mix volume independently of the input gain, so you can monitor your inputs at the right level, without affecting your recording volume.

Control CueMix with your iPad

MOTU's CueMix FX software, the mixing software that drives the powerful routing of the 4pre, can be controlled from your iPad. MOTU created CueMix templates for the TouchOSC controller app, giving you complete control over your 4pre's mixing and effects processing over a Wi-Fi network. This means that when you're recording in your studio, you don't need to keep going back to your computer to adjust gain levels, change monitoring effects, or virtually anything else you rely on CueMix for.

MOTU 4pre Hybrid USB/FireWire Interface Features:

• A great audio interface for desktop and laptop recording rigs
• Compact and rugged all-metal chassis fits easily in a backpack, but comes with the hardware you need to rackmount it
• 4 x ultra-clean and highly transparent microphone preamplifiers let you record without coloring your sound
• All analog inputs are on combo jacks, providing you with the connectivity you need to record 2 x balanced line-level sources as well as 2 x hi-Z instrument sources
• 2 x channels of S/PDIF I/O
• 2 x independent headphone outputs make collaboration easy
• Independent hands-on mixer lets you use the 4pre even without your computer
• Connects via USB 2.0 or FireWire 400
• CueMix software lets you control four mixes and 8 buses with simple tabbed interface (includes tuner, oscilloscope, real-time FFT, spectrogram waterfall, X-Y phase analysis, and other tools)
• Functions as a stand-alone 4-channel mixer, even without a computer
• Includes AudioDesk recording software

The MOTU 4pre is an audio interface that fits in any rig!