Motu M4 Audio Interface Review

[mightycicadalord]

Given #1 should be the old version, which one do you think is better between #2 and #3? Then, how to make sure to purchase the better one between these two?

#4 is the best one.

Seriously though they all probably perform extremely similarly and you'd never tell a different between them.

 

[ahhui]

Actually there are three versions.
v1 XMOS controller+ES9016S DAC+AK5554 ADC
v2 NXP controller+ES9026pro DAC+AK5554 ADC
v3 Atmel controller+ES9026pro DAC+ES9840 ADC
v2&v3 both have 2.xx firmware

View attachment 191711

Cool!
Since my M4 was just bought and it can supports Windows (#2's NXP controller does not have Windows 7 driver), my M4 is most likely to be #3, assuming that ATMEL's chip can support Windows 7.

I haven't compared the differences between the three versions, as you said, my guess is that there should be little difference in their audio performance. So I can use my current one with peace of mind.

 

[Cadence]

#4 is the best one.

Seriously though they all probably perform extremely similarly and you'd never tell a different between them.

I understand your reasoning. However, given #2 and #3 DAC chips are newer and better, why shouldn't one check, if possible?

In any case, I contacted Thomann and their reply was that, considering they have only new stock and AKM chips have not been available since October 2020, by logic they should sell M4s that correspond to #3 (Atmel + ES9026PRO + ES9840).

 

[mightycicadalord]

I understand your reasoning. However, given #2 and #3 DAC chips are newer and better, why shouldn't one check, if possible?

In any case, I contacted Thomann and their reply was that, considering they have only new stock and AKM chips have not been available since October 2020, by logic they should sell M4s that correspond to #3 (Atmel + ES9026PRO + ES9840).

If the units have distortion byproducts outside of audibility then there's not much point in trying to compare performance. Unless a potenrtial difference of 1-2db of noisefloor is super important to you.

 

[OHtaru]

Cool!
Since my M4 was just bought and it can supports Windows (#2's NXP controller does not have Windows 7 driver), my M4 is most likely to be #3, assuming that ATMEL's chip can support Windows 7.

I haven't compared the differences between the three versions, as you said, my guess is that there should be little difference in their audio performance. So I can use my current one with peace of mind.

Another way to know the version: 1 or 2 screws per XLR port.
v1: only one screw on the top left.
v2&v3: two screws on both top left and bottom right.
Apparently v2&v3's XLR port is more stable.

 

[Cadence]

Another way to know the version: 1 or 2 screws per XLR port.
v1: only one screw on the top left.
v2&v3: two screws on both top left and bottom right.
Apparently v2&v3's XLR port is more stable.

This is right. In addition, v1 was "Assembled in USA", v2 and v3 are "Made in China". I believe v1 is not available anymore and, given the absence of AKM chips, v2 shouldn't be either. I guess v3, as the response from Thomann mentioned, should be the one sold nowadays.

 

[ahhui]

Another way to know the version: 1 or 2 screws per XLR port.
v1: only one screw on the top left.
v2&v3: two screws on both top left and bottom right.
Apparently v2&v3's XLR port is more stable.

Thanks for the info, I just looked at my M4 and there are two screws on the XLR port.

 

[georgew2]

I am trying to figure out if I can achieve this:

I want to have as input a turnable (either on input 1-2 or input 3-4). The problem is that I want to have as output 3 or 4 chanells:
chanell 1 + 2 to left and right speaker and more chanell for lfe (subwoofer) using a crossover.

Using a pc, is it possible to route 2 inputs to 4 outputs with crossover using which software (the simplest just for rooting and crossovers)?

And also, is possible to achieve this permanently so not using a pc each time I use my turnable, using only my motu with turnable?

* I want to have 3 chanells output because I want to use motu with camilla dsp for room correction, so I want to have seperate chanell for sub and I would like not change the cables to speakers when playing from pc and when playing from turnable.

thanks for any help

 

[mdsimon2]

I am trying to figure out if I can achieve this:

I want to have as input a turnable (either on input 1-2 or input 3-4). The problem is that I want to have as output 3 or 4 chanells:
chanell 1 + 2 to left and right speaker and more chanell for lfe (subwoofer) using a crossover.

Using a pc, is it possible to route 2 inputs to 4 outputs with crossover using which software (the simplest just for rooting and crossovers)?

And also, is possible to achieve this permanently so not using a pc each time I use my turnable, using only my motu with turnable?

* I want to have 3 chanells output because I want to use motu with camilla dsp for room correction, so I want to have seperate chanell for sub and I would like not change the cables to speakers when playing from pc and when playing from turnable.

thanks for any help

I know next to nothing about using CamillaDSP on Windows (or Windows audio in general) but I see two ways of doing this.

First is to switch your CamillaDSP configuration to use the analog inputs (instead of a loopback or virtual soundcard input) when you want to use the analog inputs.

Second is to digitize your turntable with another ADC and the WaveInput LMS plugin -> https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/integrate-analoge-audio-devices-into-your-multi-room-system/. Of course this requires you to be running LMS.

Michael

 

[georgew2]

I said pc, but I would mean raspberry. As for the first option that you said, the input from turnable will be converted to digital and then to analogue or is it possible to bypass converting and from an 2- chanell input have a 3-chanell output without covnerting using rpi and camilla dsp?

* I think it's a noob question, but now I am trying to unsterstand the basics

 

[mdsimon2]

The M4 has no analog bypass so it will always convert an analog input to digital. That being said it is a very high quality conversion and I personally wouldn't worry about any quality degradation, especially when using a turntable.

Michael

 

[dasdoing]

here is what 60 conversions do to the sound https://www.zmix.net/Converter_Test/index.htm

 

[137tmxth]

Cool!
Since my M4 was just bought and it can supports Windows (#2's NXP controller does not have Windows 7 driver), my M4 is most likely to be #3, assuming that ATMEL's chip can support Windows 7.

I haven't compared the differences between the three versions, as you said, my guess is that there should be little difference in their audio performance. So I can use my current one with peace of mind.

I seriously doubt the third revision will have official driver support for Windows 7 either. Why would MOTU support Win7 when even MS doesn't support it anymore?

Don't like modern Windows and where it's headed? Ditch Windows already and switch to another OS entirely.

With that said, I think it may be possible to get rev2 and rev3 working under Windows 7 by editing .inf files and disabling driver signature enforcement (or using test mode and self-signing the driver, or paying to get a signature accepted by Win7 without special boot options).

I could get the driver to load for my M4 (which is either rev2 or rev3) in Win7, but no audio ever came out of it. However, I was testing in a virtual machine and I couldn't get any audio out of it under Win10 running inside a VM either. Perhaps if Win7 had been running on bare metal it'd have worked.

I'm not really interested in testing Win7 on bare metal myself, at least not right now or in the near future, too much time and effort required, but maybe someone else could do it.

edit: actually just disabling signatures is enough to load MOTUCoreUAC.sys under Win7. Some time has passed since I was playing around with this... (I also tried to use the old rev1 only driver which only has USB IDs listed in .inf for the old hardware but is officially Win7 compatible and it got blurred together with experimenting with the newer drivers in my memories)

I don't know what the unknown device labeled "M4" under "Other devices" is about, it has the exact same IDs as the actual audio device. No audio is coming out despite me playing a .wav file in WMP. I can't be bothered to test whether MIDI would actually work. Sometimes Windows also gets really slow when using the audio config control panel applet. These could very well be VM USB problems only though.

Can you still even get new drivers for Win7 signed? Something to consider before blaming hardware vendors for not supporting Win7 anymore is that Redmond clearly doesn't want anyone to support it.

 

[ahhui]

I seriously doubt the third revision will have official driver support for Windows 7 either. Why would MOTU support Win7 when even MS doesn't support it anymore?

Don't like modern Windows and where it's headed? Ditch Windows already and switch to another OS entirely.

With that said, I think it may be possible to get rev2 and rev3 working under Windows 7 by editing .inf files and disabling driver signature enforcement (or using test mode and self-signing the driver, or paying to get a signature accepted by Win7 without special boot options).

I could get the driver to load for my M4 (which is either rev2 or rev3) in Win7, but no audio ever came out of it. However, I was testing in a virtual machine and I couldn't get any audio out of it under Win10 running inside a VM either. Perhaps if Win7 had been running on bare metal it'd have worked.

I'm not really interested in testing Win7 on bare metal myself, at least not right now or in the near future, too much time and effort required, but maybe someone else could do it.

edit: actually just disabling signatures is enough to load MOTUCoreUAC.sys under Win7. Some time has passed since I was playing around with this... (I also tried to use the old rev1 only driver which only has USB IDs listed in .inf for the old hardware but is officially Win7 compatible and it got blurred together with experimenting with the newer drivers in my memories)

View attachment 193662

I don't know what the unknown device labeled "M4" under "Other devices" is about, it has the exact same IDs as the actual audio device. No audio is coming out despite me playing a .wav file in WMP. I can't be bothered to test whether MIDI would actually work. Sometimes Windows also gets really slow when using the audio config control panel applet. These could very well be VM USB problems only though.

Can you still even get new drivers for Win7 signed? Something to consider before blaming hardware vendors for not supporting Win7 anymore is that Redmond clearly doesn't want anyone to support it.

Hi, There are two reasons why I chose the earlier version of M4, one is Win7, I really don't like Win10, it is slow and cumbersome; the other reason is that I am also a Linux user (Ubuntu 21.10), so I hope my sound interface can support Linux, I have done some research, about a year ago I saw on the linuxmusicians.com that someone successfully used M2/M4 on linux, the M2/M4 they were using at the time must have been an first version, so when I was going to buy an M4 I deliberately chose the old version.

I don't know much about virtual machines, so I don't know whether the Win7 under the virtual machine can support M4 normally. But as you said, I also found an additional M4 device on my Win7, I uploaded a screenshot of the device manager showing an extra M4 in other devices. I can't install the driver for it, but it doesn't affect the M4 works well, so i decided to ignore it.

Regarding the new drivers for Win7 signed, I am currently using 4.0.8 officially version. I have downloaded and saved all the drivers of M-Series from MOTU’s website, I found that some higher version drivers don't work well on win7, and finally I chose the 4.0.8 version.

Cheers.

 

[137tmxth]

Hi, There are two reasons why I chose the earlier version of M4, one is Win7, I really don't like Win10, it is slow and cumbersome; the other reason is that I am also a Linux user (Ubuntu 21.10), so I hope my sound interface can support Linux, I have done some research, about a year ago I saw on the linuxmusicians.com that someone successfully used M2/M4 on linux, the M2/M4 they were using at the time must have been an first version, so when I was going to buy an M4 I deliberately chose the old version.

I don't know much about virtual machines, so I don't know whether the Win7 under the virtual machine can support M4 normally. But as you said, I also found an additional M4 device on my Win7, I uploaded a screenshot of the device manager showing an extra M4 in other devices. I can't install the driver for it, but it doesn't affect the M4 works well, so i decided to ignore it.

Regarding the new drivers for Win7 signed, I am currently using 4.0.8 officially version. I have downloaded and saved all the drivers of M-Series from MOTU’s website, I found that some higher version drivers don't work well on win7, and finally I chose the 4.0.8 version.

Yeah, I don't like what Windows became after Win7 either. Just wanted to say that attempting to stick with Win7 forever isn't really a good solution, eventually nothing will work anymore and the chance of getting exploited becomes a serious concern.

Another thing I wanted to say is that I suspect all hardware revisions of the M4 (and probably M2 too) can work under Win7 if driver signature check is bypassed, but I am unable to verify it because I can't be bothered to install Win7 outside of a VM to try it out. I don't have a machine up and running with Win7 already, and no complete working "spare" machine I could just quickly throw it on.

I know that the M4 does NOT work in Win10 either IF Win10 is running in a VM with USB passthrough. I guess PCIe passthrough of a complete USB host controller could work better but again, someone else has to try. I don't have the hardware for that.

Do the newer drivers have other problems in Win7 if you bypass the digital signing crap (and manually install them via device manager if necessary)?

btw. my M4 works fine in Linux and it's definitely not the oldest XMOS-based version. I have yet to open the case so I can't say whether it's NXP or Atmel though, if that distinction even matters. I suspect it is NXP though since I bought mine when some people didn't even know that there had been a hardware revision yet, and Linux support for non-XMOS units had only recently been added.

 

[ahhui]

Yeah, I don't like what Windows became after Win7 either. Just wanted to say that attempting to stick with Win7 forever isn't really a good solution, eventually nothing will work anymore and the chance of getting exploited becomes a serious concern.

Another thing I wanted to say is that I suspect all hardware revisions of the M4 (and probably M2 too) can work under Win7 if driver signature check is bypassed, but I am unable to verify it because I can't be bothered to install Win7 outside of a VM to try it out. I don't have a machine up and running with Win7 already, and no complete working "spare" machine I could just quickly throw it on.

I know that the M4 does NOT work in Win10 either IF Win10 is running in a VM with USB passthrough. I guess PCIe passthrough of a complete USB host controller could work better but again, someone else has to try. I don't have the hardware for that.

Do the newer drivers have other problems in Win7 if you bypass the digital signing crap (and manually install them via device manager if necessary)?

btw. my M4 works fine in Linux and it's definitely not the oldest XMOS-based version. I have yet to open the case so I can't say whether it's NXP or Atmel though, if that distinction even matters. I suspect it is NXP though since I bought mine when some people didn't even know that there had been a hardware revision yet, and Linux support for non-XMOS units had only recently been added.

I haven't tried more other versions of my M4 driver to run on Win7, once I installed its driver and it works well, I'm not going to working on it, because actually the USB driver part on my Win7 is a total mess, there are too many USB devices and unknown drivers out there. Last week I wasted few hours upgrading the firmware for my Wavestate and it didn't work out, finally I had to take my Wavestate to a friend's computer to complete the upgrade.

I've heard of ways to bypass driver’s digital signing, but I've never tried it, if it's important and helpful to you, you can let me know and maybe I can try it sometime.

 

[137tmxth]

I haven't tried more other versions of my M4 driver to run on Win7, once I installed its driver and it works well, I'm not going to working on it, because actually the USB driver part on my Win7 is a total mess, there are too many USB devices and unknown drivers out there. Last week I wasted few hours upgrading the firmware for my Wavestate and it didn't work out, finally I had to take my Wavestate to a friend's computer to complete the upgrade.

I've heard of ways to bypass driver’s digital signing, but I've never tried it, if it's important and helpful to you, you can let me know and maybe I can try it sometime.

No, it's not really important to me. I don't use Win7 anymore.

I just strongly suspect that even Win7 holdouts don't really need to go out of their way to find a XMOS-based M4 unit if they are willing to use drivers without a digital signature accepted by Win7. It'd certainly be interesting to have this confirmed, but not that important.

Bypassing the digital signature requirement for drivers temporarily on Win7 is as easy as hammering F8 on boot and selecting "disable driver signature enforcement" from the boot options menu.

IIRC, in Win7 (unlike later versions) this setting can be permanently enabled via bcdedit for long-term use of drivers without an accepted digital signature. The command is "bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on" (must have admin privileges) if my memory serves me right. Thereafter, unsigned drivers work just the same as signed except for a warning dialog box you get once at installation time.

Another option is generating your own certificate, self-signing drivers using freely available tools and the certificate, then enabling "test signing mode" which allows loading such self-signed (but not completely unsigned) drivers.

 

[137tmxth]

Okay, since no one else will probably satisfy my "intellectual curiosity" and I had a couple of hours to waste, I decided to test my non-XMOS MOTU M4 in Windows 7, this time running on bare metal.

Conclusion: If you disable driver signature enforcement (very easy, just run "bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on" as administrator and reboot), or use test mode and self-sign the driver (slightly more involved), it seems to work perfectly. I've tested both WASAPI and ASIO applications using the latest driver version available from MOTU's website as of today (March 25, 2022) which officially only supports Windows 10 and 11.

The included online installer for .NET Framework 4.6 failed to download it for some reason (why couldn't MOTU just throw in the offline installer which will always work...), so the applet for controlling sample rate and buffer size initially did not run, but installing .NET Framework 4.6 manually using an offline installer fixed it.

You'll also have to manually install the correct driver via device manager. Windows refuses to install the correct driver automatically after connecting the device, I guess due to the lack of valid signature:

Don't let anyone tell you you need a XMOS M4 for Win7 compatibility! (or Linux compatibility, for that matter)

update edit:

The "nointegritychecks" boot option is actually not needed, it is ignored by Windows 7 anyway according to documentation from Microsoft themselves. It seems Vista was the last version where the user was allowed the freedom to permanently disable all kernel mode code signing checks...

I think the reason it works regardless is that MOTUCoreUAC.sys is actually a user mode driver (running custom code in kernel mode is not always necessary in USB device drivers for Windows), and Windows code signing requirements have always only applied to kernel mode.

So just install the latest driver package from MOTU's website, then force-install the correct driver via device manager after you connect M4 via USB. You get warnings about it not being properly signed but who cares. It is only necessary to do this once (for every USB port in your computer you connect the device to).

 

[Smuckers]

I have both V1 and V3 of this interface. I had a V1 originally, it went bad (outputting only white noise), got it replaced under RMA, which took a while, and I was in the middle of needing another, so bought one. Then the original came in.

Something I've noticed between them in operation: V1 can achieve a lower latency on my system without causing glitches. At 92Khz sampling, it will run reliably at 32 samples. The V3 has to run around 128 to be stable. I have an AMD-based system (5950X, 32GB RAM, etc) and have noticed odd USB behavior at times.

The V1 in particular will glitch out and turn audio into a 1/4 speed digital-sounding mess. Resetting the driver resolves the issue. This also happens with the V3, though it's far less often. I suspect a mild driver issue exists, or multiple softwares are trying to use the interface exclusively (I have not checked). It's rare and random, so far causing nothing more than a brief annoyance. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue.

Overall, I prefer the V1 - the latency is better, the signal output seems slightly higher. The V3 is my backup, but also seems to function well, and I hope with future driver updates/firmwares that any other issues will be resolved.

EDIT: I just saw that a new firmware released on the 22nd of this month. The V1 says "up to date" already, and the V3 took the update. I wonder if that will improve the latency differences between the two versions.

 

[jadenphan]

Hi all,

I just recently got a Motu M4 - (not sure which version, but seller (Focus Camera) said they received the stock this year). My previous setup was Topping E30/L30 to JBL 305P. Now, I use M4 as DAC to replace E30, and connect it directly to JBL 305P. I am, however, encountering constant crackling, static, high-pitch noises with music playback... I need some help to understand this issue and find a solution.

This originally happened with my Windows laptop, I tried to change buffer size between (256-512) and sample rate (44100-48000), though it doesn't seem to help much. I finally unchecked the box "Sync Windows sample rate to device" and it seems to work a bit better, so I think sample rate is now finally set at 48,000... That said, I will need to continue monitoring to see if the issue comes back. I then try connecting the M4 to my Mac, and after 10 mins or so, the same thing happened for playback through Spotify, Serato! My Mac sample rate is at 48,000 which I thought should be good? I haven't tried with Ableton yet, however, this is very frustrating to me...Can anybody tell me what I should do here?

Thanks all for your help here.