I ran into this little beast yesterday, anybody have any experience on it?
Description
I want to know if it has some awful midi/stability problem, and if the preamps and a/d-converters are good. Otherwise it seems sooo nice 
I did a search on this forum but couldn’t find anything on the subject, btw…
edit: the full name is Ego-Systems Quatafire 610 firewire. It just got new driver update yesterday that supports Mac OSX, in case somebody’s interested…
Hmm, I thought somebody had this thing. It costs about the same as m-audio firewire 410 but doesn’t (?) have those nasty midi/latency/other problems (or does it? I only found one forum that had something on this subject and somebody said it performs well, but it would be nice to know what others think too). So I was thinking somebody might have something to say about it… 
Argh… I tested this unit about 2 months ago, at least I tried to. Ego-Sys previously announced 3 FireWire units. Quata, Octa and Hexa Fire. Only Quata is out. The other 2 has been removed from their website.
AD/DA works wery well. +48V Phantom power too. The sound quality is fair good, better than AKM-driven Audiophile. And that’s all cool about it 
When I connected for the first time and powered on with the button, my PC went off. The same repeated several times, with or without AC Adapter connected to Quata. The only way to start PC, was to Power the Quata first, than PC. I checked this unit with another PC and laptop. Same problem.
The other thing. Look at their website. They didn’t released the driver from FEB 04. These drivers are absolutely unusable. You cannot monitor OUT/IN with them. The only way to do it is to use the ASIO driven application.
I tested one of the first units released. Maybe it was internally damaged. But I think they screwed something. I emailed deutsch, korean and england offices. They said that it must be something with my PC and the new drivers will be available in 2-4 weeks.
As for me, this is junk.
stay away from ego-sys. they’re hardware looks like it would be really cool in theory, but in practice i hear they’re generally kind of buggy andd difficult to get working right.
Well the add sounds cool when i read 192Khz in big signs but when reading the tech specs:
" 24bit 96kHz AD converter;"
192Khz is only for DA convertion…
I’m pleased with my Terratec Dmx fire 24/96 card… it works at least without crashing or destabalizing my platform.
I think I looked at this one when I was out to buy an audio interface too, but I don’t know…based on what others have posted it doesn’t seem like a great choice. Outputs look to be unbalanced, which basically means more noise if you’re going to have longer cables, and you won’t be able to get the most out of the monitors you’re using. Not the biggest issue if you’re not too concerned about those sorts of things, but if you want if you’re considering a pro setup, definitely look into something with balanced speaker outputs.
Also, the QuataFire 610 is USB bus powered (‘dirty power’), so again you won’t get as good results as you would using an interface with a separate power supply. It just means D/A and A/D conversions will be better and more accurate as far as I know, like better response to fast transients.
To be honest, the only interface I’ve really heard is the MOTU 828mkII, which I must say is obsolutely unbelievable all around (haven’t had any problems with it except for needing a more expensive Texas Instruments firewire card), but a big price tag of course. Another unit I came across not long after I bought mine was the EMU 1820 and 1820M. Kind of in the same price range as the M-Audio products I think, so I highly recommend consider those too.
As for the 192 KHz issue: A shop retailer told me that it’s like having a car with 5 wheels. Unnecessary really, unless you’re working in a 5.1 environment. Though the human ear can essentially only hear frequencies up to about 20,000 Hz, the 192 KHz does give a greater accuracy in the higher frequencies due to oversampling or some technical thing like that I think. The bottom line: Ok, going from 44.1 KHz to 96 KHz is nice and gives off more of a sheen, but I really question whether 192 KHz D/A conversion would make that much of a difference.
To be honest, 96 / 192Khz can add more values when discussing about more accurate sound-precision reaching the analog result.
In other ways you have a better curve for interpolation of bad sounds.
So for recording studios remastering old vinyl and other old stuff that is crackled or otherwise needs some patching up, such features are no luxury in these cases (also when filtering the sound).
But using the USB bus is a bit improfessional for applying so much power to such a device IMHO. I would expect a lot of in-case memory for prebuffering to catch up transportation problems.
Using the USB bus is a nice solution if you want to use the sound-board on your laptop, but in any other case i would not buy such device and my laptop is not powerfull enough for processing the stuff at a reasonable level.
Thanks for the replies. I called the local retailer and he said the ego-sys quatafire unit is very popular and has no midi/other problems (believes who wants). But I think I’m going to spend some more and get me a Edirol fa-101 or Layla laptop. I’ve considered Motu 828mk2 also but seems it has too much problems running on a pc.
Really?
What about the drivers? About the control panel? Please, just tell me that level indicators works well on monitored in/outs 
Check out, what they have changed:
http://www.esi-pro.com/download.php?mode=v…2&page=1&id=147
There are MAJOR updates.
Sorry but for me this unit was unusable under Sound Forge. Cubase VST has some problems, I had to reset audio devices very often. That’s the only software I’m using during the production in studio.
Of course, Quata worked fine with Renoise. Midi ports too, but not when you needed to get maximum of it’s promised potential.
I’m going to check the latest version of Quata drivers and test this unit again next week.
I ended up choosing Edirol FA-101 instead, because of 10 balanced ins & outs, solid drivers and good midi-compatibility. All I’ve heard from it is purely positive… Paid 600€ of it, not to bad I think when talking about prices in Finland (list price was 695 everywhere). Perhaps I’ll report my experiences on it later when it arrives in about 2 weeks, if somebody is interested.