M-Audio Octane design flaw warning

[drum-van]

i thought i would post this report due to the large number of people that ask this and other forums about which 8 channel pre-amps they should purchase.

i recently bought an m-audio octane unit for recording drum tracks in my home studio. i use the adat lightpipe to connect to my protools 6.4 le system. my mic setup consists of the following:
kick - audix d6
snare and toms - sm57's
overheads - (2) marshall mxl 2003's
hi hat - rode nt-1a

i discovered almost immediately that when plugging my overhead condenser mics onto channels 7&8 with phantom power engaged, that a fairly loud buzzing and humming noise came up. the noise slowly faded away after about 10-15 min. i switched chords, outlets, ground scenarios etc. and it still happened after a cold start. the weird thing was that if i engaged the -20 db pad on channels 7&8 the buzz went away, even with the gain all the way up. m-audio sent me a 2nd unit to try to see if the unit was defective. same results with the 2nd unit.

i took the octane to a local high end recording studio to check it with other mics, cables and power supply. same results with my mics (marshall's & rode) but when some neumann u87's were used, no buzz. we started trying some other mics with different ohm ratings (adk-a51's, oktava mk012's, shure ksm-141's). bottom line, any mic less than 200 ohms caused channels 7&8 to buzz. i informed m-audio's tech support of this and they did their own testing of the octane units at their factory with various mics. sure enough, they have admitted to me that it is a design flaw.

so, if you have an m-audio octane or are looking to buy an octane be careful about the condensers you use. anything less than 200 ohms will more than likely cause you a very annoying buzz or a 15 min. warm up time for the noise to go away.

hope this post helps someone. it cost me a lot of time, headaches and some $$ to ship one of my octane units back to the factory. worse yet, m-audio didn't even say thanks for finding the flaw or offer any thoughts as to if the problem would get worse over time. go figure

van