When I started my professional career in recordings and production, I built my first recording setup but I always felt a little bored by specs, models, brands and all that geek gibberish. I was about to buy my first converters and I had heard that, among other options, RME was quite good. I didn't bother too much about trying it out or finding out too much about it, I just checked a couple of reviews and I was like "ok, seems good and looks sexy, I'll buy it".

So I spent a lot of studio hours working with RME as my main brain, but being a newcomer to digital technology I had never tried other converters before, so I thought it was simply doing what it was supposed to do, and doing it well. Years later, when I needed a second recording setup, I decided that although I was quite happy with RME there was new gear on the market and several "boutique" brands were doing converters themselves so I could give them a try. It was after actually buying a couple of different converters (top renowned ones) and spending some time with them that I realized just how much I missed the stability, the routing possibilities, the steady clock and the clear truthful conversion of RME. It didn't take me much mathematics to realize that I was going to stick to RME. Again.

There's this neat trick I found. If you want to get a really cool distorted tone on vocals, you just need to plug one SM58 on those cool Fireface 800 built in preamps, and crank it up to the max. It won't give you that noisy digital clipping, but instead - and I'm guessing it is due to the extremely efficient soft-limiting and the wide headroom range - it will sound like a cranked up vintage highly saturated preamp. I stopped using plugins or additional outboard to emulate vocal distortion ever since.

More information: Daniel Cardoso on Wikipedia