What do you think is the best audio interface?

[Stimpy]

That PreSonus is tempting, but artist edition of Studio One is quite limited.

Otherwise Studio One is the BEST DAW. I had a 30 day trial, and it is basically engineered from the ground up to put Cubase to shame. Obviously it has it's own idiosyncrasies, but for acoustic/amplifed music it is awesome.

Plus it's an American ad. Wonder what the cheapest I can get the 4 mic-pre one is.

 

[DirkP]

very surprised the focusrite is rated higher than the rme or apogee. I have never been impressed with the focusrite interfaces. sound very "2d" to me. Pres are good on a lot of these. internal clocks and conversion is where you lose the nice wide 3d sound.

I guess not many here own a RME. The question is somehow vague, many who replied might have answered the question: what is the best interface in relation to price.

 

[beans-on-toast]

I like the Focusrite boxes. I use the Clarett. Very good quality, sound, performance, features, and customer service.

 

[brianrost]

I use a Focusrite, but I chose Apogee because it is the best on your list.

 

[Omega Monkey]

I think for general purposes, in terms of price/features/quality the best one out currently is the focusrite scarlett 18i20. Enough mic inputs to record a full drum set (or whatever else you might want), various digital ins/outs, good quality pres, etc.. for about $500.

 

[Jayhawk]

Apogee is the best. That said, I own Focusrite and Tascam because Apogee is also quite expensive for my use.

 

[40Hz]

very surprised the focusrite is rated higher than the rme or apogee. I have never been impressed with the focusrite interfaces. sound very "2d" to me. Pres are good on a lot of these. internal clocks and conversion is where you lose the nice wide 3d sound.

Never noticed the loss of any nice wide 3D. But I'm older and maybe I just can't hear it any more, assuming I ever could.

FWIW, although I prefer Focusrite, I really can't comment on RME or Apogee - because I've haven't used them - so I didn't. And maybe that's a bit of why Focusrite is "rated" higher. Folks are just speaking from their own experience and not quoting spec sheets or magazine articles. That's refreshing if that's the case. Because with this stuff, hands-on is everything. And it's not so much what's "better" as it is what you know how to work with.

As Frenchy-Lefty pointed out earlier - unless you're an audio professional, you're unlikely to have very much exposure to, or working experience with, that many audio interfaces.

And I think that's what's driving the poll.

 

[johnnyfever]

Focusrite makes good stuff. I haven't really looked for an interface in a few years as I have my studio all set up, sounds good, doesn't crash. After years of wishing for this and grinding through computers not liking drivers or updates, not speaking with some of my other gear etc, I don't mess with it now. I set mine up around 4 years ago, so I'm still running pt8. Back then the rme and apogee stuff had the best converters and pre's in the affordable tier of gear. It was about 3 times as much as the focusrite, presonus and maudio gear at the time. I thoroughly tested the gear at the time, and it was a tossup between the profire 2626 and the focusrite, with the edge going to the profire. It was just slightly clearer, and had a few more features in the dsp. The clarrett looks nice, but its lightningbolt. usb 3.1 kills LB in speed and bandwidth, and I am not an apple fan due to all the proprietary stuff they are doing. Sidenote-did you know they are getting rid of headphone jacks on the next Iphone so you can only use headphones they sell? Insane if you ask me. Its too bad because they are a more solid OS platform, they just get a bit too greedy.

Anyway, If I was in the market again, it sounds like focusrite has the best bang for the buck right now.

 

[beans-on-toast]

Years ago Apogee was a pioneer in digital outboard equipment. Their equipment was and still is, used in many high end studios. Their prices were, and still are, very high. They would argue that you pay for what you get. A lot of companies have got into the digital IO business many excellent products are available at more affordable prices today. Other companies have caught up and can go toe-to-toe with Apogee. They've just released the Symphony MkII, a thunderbolt based system that competes with products such as the Focusrite Clarett.

All this competition is great for us. Products that have one or eight mic inputs typically use the same mic pres. There is great value in the less expensive models. Hopefully we'll see more high end performance products offered at more affordable prices.

 

[fisticuffs]

RME, Universal Audio, Apogee and some others are clearly in a class about the rest of the list. But not everyone can afford a Bentley. Hardware wise there's lots of good choices. Software-wise, talking drivers not DAW's, MOTU followed by AVID, Roland, Focusrite (although they make some Bentley's as well), Persons, Alesis/M-Audio/AKAI are all basically the same company, Steinberg is Roland, Mackie and Tascam don't really play much in this market anymore. The B word and anything that looks to be a waaaaay better price than the rest of them is probably crap.

 

[johnnyfever]

The down side of companies like maudio, is that when they change ownership, old products become "legacy". The profire 2626 was a hell of an interface. I still have 2 of them than work great, but you cant upgrade anything around them as there is no new driver or software support. I've never been impressed with avid lower end stuff. The digi002 and 003 were ok, but nothing to write home about. Something to definitely think about when buying is future support and relevancy. with usb3.1 coming out, it might be wise to let this generation of lightning bolt based interfaces pass as 3.1 is supposed to be way faster with better bandwidth, not to mention it is pretty proprietary.

 

[rufus.K]

Still using Digi002s and Motu828's.
Using outboard preamps and mixers, I've no complaint with either of them. I like that I can (and have) light piped 2 828s together to get 15 simultaneous tracks.

 

[Ulf_Hansson]

P.S. Presonus AudioBox is NOT the BEST audio interface but, IMHO,
it's THE BEST audio interface for the beginners in terms of the PRICE, and you are also getting Studio One 3 DAW.
NOTHING CAN BEAT - IMHO - the following deal from Guitar Center - $69.99 for Presonus AudioBox 2x2 USB Audio Interface.

View attachment 736816

Agree that this seems to be a great deal. Both the audio interface and the bundle SW covers most of the needs for home recording. If you do drums you need more inputs.

 

[Gaolee]

I have a Steinberg interface. It's the only one I have, so it's the best I have ever used. That's pretty much that. The one I have now has four mic preamps, and I want more capacity, so it's getting replaced with another Steinberg. They are probably all about the same, but I forget enough about how the whole thing works fast enough that going with some other kind of interface or software other than Cubase just isn't in the cards. Finally, the one I'm upgrading to, a UR824, can be daisy chained to two more for a grand total of 24 simultaneous mic channels plus whatever midi and DI you can stuff into it. That should be more than plenty, even if some wild hair get up and I get ambitious.

The whole system has to run on a PC, because I won't buy any Apple products, ever. Their habit of making everything clunky one-offs that only they sell means they won't sell me anything at all.

 

[NoiseNinja]

The Mackie Onyx 820i combined mixer and Firewire sound card was probably the best audio interface I ever owned.

I am however pretty satisfied with the Edirol FA-101 Firewire sound card I own now.

Other than that I have owned an M-Audio Delta 44 PCI soundcard with break-out box, and although it didn't offer any other features than line in out and inputs that was pretty good too.

The crappiest audio interface I probably ever owned was a M-Audio Fast Track USB sound card, as it only featured 1 single XLR Mic input and 1 single Jack instrument input, with fairly crappy amplifiers build in, and further more was unable to record in higher quality than 24 Bit 44.1 KHz, or was it 48?

Also the Fast Track is the only sound interface I ever had to finally die on me, as the direct monitoring feature suddenly stopped working one day and made it impossible to use for multi track recordings.

I guess my vote goes for Mackie then, although I would say it is hard to be objective, as it is mostly a question of what your needs are, extra features and the quality of those features, beside the most important part: That it works for multi track recordings.

 

[Rudreax]

RME, mainly because they seem to have the BEST drivers out there compared to any other interface. Followed closely behind by MOTU.

My logic is it doesn't matter what features the interface has if it can't consistently communicate with the computer.

 

[blastbass]

Metric Halo, Lavry, Lynx, Antelope Audio, Prism. Still haven't heard convertors as good as those on the Paris system I was working on years ago. Also I'm not sure in what respect to consider "best brand", convertors? Pre's?

 

[ofajen]

I have a friend who uses Prism converters in his studio and they work great. But any time there is a problem with the computer and they have to do part of a session on his 3M analog machine, those tracks invariably mix easier and sound better to everyone. Personally I haven't a clue, I sold him the last of my 3Ms, but still record and mix on my Otari machines.

Otto

 

[silky smoove]

The clarrett looks nice, but its lightningbolt. usb 3.1 kills LB in speed and bandwidth, and I am not an apple fan due to all the proprietary stuff they are doing. Sidenote-did you know they are getting rid of headphone jacks on the next Iphone so you can only use headphones they sell? Insane if you ask me. Its too bad because they are a more solid OS platform, they just get a bit too greedy.

Anyway, If I was in the market again, it sounds like focusrite has the best bang for the buck right now.

This is all a little misleading. First-off, it's Thunderbolt not Lightningbolt. Secondly, if you're talking about USB 3.1 the comparison to Thunderbolt (currently Thunderbolt 2) is not fair. If you were to compare Thunderbolt 2 with USB 3 (not 3.1) you would have a more accurate comparison. USB 3 would lose that battle handsomely, but at least the technologies would be from the same generational release. On top of that there are quite a few, although not a ton, of TB2 interfaces, and only a couple USB3 interfaces available as most manufacturers didn't really jump on the tech.

Getting back to USB3.1, when you compare it to the upcoming TB3 there is once again no contest. Not only are the supposed track counts allowed by TB3 around 10x that of USB3.1, the TB3 machines will be able to run interfaces sporting either TB3 or USB3.1 connections (both protocols use the same USB-C style connector). Comparatively USB3.1 machines cannot run TB3 interfaces despite having the same connector, which is a real shame as it limits your choices in interfaces... Although if we see the same trend in USB3/TB2 interfaces with the upcoming USB3.1/TB3 interfaces, there won't be many of the USB3.1 variety anyway.

All of this means very very little to most users outside of large studios as the big gains with these updated protocols are all about achievable track counts with manageable levels of latency. For anybody running a 4 (or less) input interface on even a decent computer could easily get by with perfectly acceptable latency on a USB2 device, despite it being the absolute worst spec of any product still being manufactured.

As to your last sentence: I absolutely agree. I don't think there's anything out there that can touch their Clarrett interfaces for the money, assuming you can work with the Thunderbolt connection.

EDIT: Oh, and as to the whole headphone jacks on iPhones thing... Yeah... I'm still unsure as to how that's going to play out. I use the headphone jack on mine daily. You could always use ANYONE's Bluetooth headphones with it, and I'm sure a lot of third party companies will come out with lightning jack headphones, but it does seem like an odd choice.

 

[claudel]

I seriously like my iConnectAUDIO4...