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Does audio interfaces really matter?

muk said:
An RME does not sound better than these, because there are no measurable differences in the audible spectrum.
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Yeah cheap audio interfaces have gotten amazing in the past couple of years.

When I bought my first RME back in the mid 00s the difference was truly night and day with my previous interface which wasn't cheap at all.

Still, RME does offer plenty of good stuff other than audio quality. Best ASIO drivers in the industry, TotalMix, and legendary support of their products. Some of their interfaces have a feature which I haven't seen anywhere else. It's a standalone mode where you can record straight into a USB drive without the need of a computer.

kitekrazy said:
Thunderbolt it is probably still in its infancy and kinda controlled by Apple
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Thunderbolt is made by Intel actually.

It's much less prevalent in the PC world because it's a jungle of hardware manufacturers. Maybe also the licensing and specialized controller costs.
 
Almost as long for (2) Saffire Pro14(s) (Firewire interface). Likely less demanding home studio needs, yet quite pleased with headphone /powered studio monitors + sub /integrated stereo amp +spkrs.
 
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Pier said:
Thunderbolt is made by Intel actually.

It's much less prevalent in the PC world because it's a jungle of hardware manufacturers. Maybe also the licensing and specialized controller costs.
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You often get Thunderbolt with newer Intel laptops but in my experience, it's way less common with desktop PCs (also the pre-built ones). As far as I understand, one reason is that desktops are way more flexible (e.g. switch that card, upgrade that part, etc.), so it's way more complicated to make Thunderbolt work within the standards (e.g., GPUs are one of the reasons, see for example here: )

Apart from that, Thunderbolt seems to be geared towards extending the capabilities of your machine which for a laptop mostly means having an external device. On a desktop PC, depending on your motherboard, you have way more options to do that (e.g., external GPU vs internal GPU, external SSD vs internal SSD etc.).
 
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
 
kitekrazy said:
The logic is USB will still be around. As for Thunderbolt it is probably still in its infancy and kinda controlled by Apple.
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So you'd think! (I mean USB being around.)

I thought FireWire would always be around just because of all the video cameras that used it, but what did I know.
 
GtrString said:
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
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What about the headphone amp and for that matter the headphones? Do they matter?

And I ask those rhetorical questions as someone who hates how every time someone asks for help he or she gets pages of "you should buy xxxx" followed by "+1 for the xxxx" followed by "you need to spend money on room treatment." :)
 
To be honest, when my audio interface was on the fritz, I just used my Mac's core audio sound card. Since all I was doing was working with sample libraries and not using mics, I couldn't tell the difference. But then my ears are shot.
 
GtrString said:
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
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The amount of recording I do approaches zero.
Budget friendly interfaces I remember having: Tascam US-322, M-Audio Fast Track, Steinberg UR 22 or whatever it was called, a Scarlet (it was 2nd gen and wasn't the tiniest one) and an Audient ID 14 MK1.
There were a couple of others but I don't know any more.

End of last year I treated myself to a RME UCX II.
Totally overkill for my use, yes.
But so much (much, much) better than any interface I had before.
It sounds better (as in the headphone out). The latency is better. I can stress it harder before playback starts crackling.

Yeah it's expensive and it is absolutely not necessary if you don't run a project studio that absolutely requires all the things that it enables you to do, but saying it doesn't matter is just wrong.
 
Pier said:
It's much less prevalent in the PC world because it's a jungle of hardware manufacturers. Maybe also the licensing and specialized controller costs.
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Licensing, mainly. TB is almost ubiquitous on Intel platforms (duh!), but you have to either buy a halo product board or hope and pray that your mobo manufacturer both has a TB expansion card (and accompanying port on the board) and hasn't discontinued it if you're an AMD user like many are these days. Otherwise you're SOL if you're on an AMD platform.
 
Pier said:
Yes. A lot.
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GtrString said:
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
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My old M-Audio Fast Track Ultra, the new Apollo Thunderbolt and the monstrous AVID MTRX in a studio sound all the same to me. Or, at least, I can't hear any difference working with VIs. And if I can't, why would I choose one over another).
 
GtrString said:
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
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Even with VI only, you would need decent latency for audio out. Otherwise, the delay between pressing the key on MIDI keyboard, going to DAW, to VI of your choice, out of DAW, to audio output will become noticeable. As I said, for me, it has to be less than 10ms. For you, it might be less or more, but it's not unimportant.

Unless you put notes into piano roll with a mouse...

For the record, I'm using Prism Atlas via USB and my output latency with 44.1kHz, 128 buffer is 6ms.
 
GtrString said:
The gear lobby seems to rule these Forums now. But if you just record virtual instruments, never record guitars or vocals ect, and just mix on headphones - the interface you use means zero, zip, nada, nothing, nil.
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But you still need a good headphone amp inside the interface...and when mixing on monitors, the interface is crucial (based on my experience, at least). For rendering mixes, then it for sure doesn't matter.
 
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