Best and Worst Audio Interfaces of 2024.. TESTED!

Hello friends I'm Chris and I want to help you get beautiful recordings so I've made a massive chart that compares over 90 audio interfaces in their all current models I've also purchased used and tested most of the more popular models that are on this chart I have a Facebook group called get beautiful recordings where I'm available to answer any questions and just help you get better sounding recordings in your home studio you see when I first started recording about 20 years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to buy a whole bunch of really expensive gear but I made the mistake of following advice from just random people online and a lot of it was bad advice and I just couldn't figure out why my recordings still weren't sounding good even some of the really inexpensive recording equipment that's available today it's possible to get great sounding recordings with it take this for example I recorded this artist with a baringer UMC 204hd and the same song in the same place with a universal audio Apollo [Music] twin somebody who love you the way I could tell run when you want somebody we can't find somebody who love you the way I could did you hear much of a difference between those two recordings so feel free to join the community at get beautiful recordings now with audio interfaces there's a lot to choose from but some of them will be better for you than others based on your specific goals your budget and your preferences and there's a lot of standard features that all of these interfaces have and there's some features that some have and some don't so I'm going to go over a bunch of these features and rate them as some features being more important and some features being less important now for me the absolute most important feature is of course the sound quality there's three main components of an audio interface that contribute to the sound quality the preamps the converters and the headphone outputs now there's always going to be a little bit of a noise floor in every recording this is just white noise that's created from the electronics and it can't be avoided but it can be reduced better quality gear will have a lower noise floor the single biggest contributor to the noise floor is the preamps and this is the reason that when I'm reading an audio interface I put a lot of emphasis on the noise floor of the preamps the noise floor of a preamp is measured as Ein equivalent input noise and manufacturers will often publish the Ein specifications based on their own testing but some manufacturers cheat the tests a little bit just like if you were to test what the fastest your car could go and you perform the test going downhill it's not really a fair test so I don't trust manufacturers published specifications I do all my own in-house testing and I've tested a whole bunch of Standalone preamps as well as audio interface preamps and let's take a look at the results of this testing in this chart anything that's less than a six is extremely low noise that's the L connect 6 universal audio Apollo series SSL 2 2 plus and 12 and the audient ID series interfaces between a six and 8 are still pretty low noise for most recordings the noise floor won't be noticeable interfaces in this category are the Behringer UMC series universal audio volt series pronus Studio series nyman mt48 and audient Evo series and anything higher than an 8 might have a little bit of a noticeable noise floor in normal recordings interfaces in this category are the m audio air Focus right Scarlet Gen 4 Motu M2 and Steinberg ur22c a lot of people like to spend extra money on highquality external preamps but with the quality of the preamps in some of these interfaces you might actually end up with a lower quality preamp if you do that so here's an example of the noise floor that you would get with the Focus right Scarlet Gen 4 I'm talking into a sh sm7b which is notorious for having a low output and needing lots of gain which results in a higher noise floor than you would get with pretty much any other microphone and just for reference I'm also recording into this shotgun microphone right here which is about 2 or 3 fet away so here's what it sounds like and just for reference I'm also recording into this shotgun microphone right here which is about 2 or 3 ft away so here's what it sounds like and now let's put our listening yours on we're going to listen to the noise floor just by itself and we're going to listen to the equivalent noise floor that you would get with this microphone plugged into a few other audio interfaces as well I also did some testing to reveal any perceived sound quality or coloration of the preamps all of these preamps that I tested were extremely transparent but some more than others the way I conducted this test was I recorded an acoustic guitar then played that recording out the line output and then it went through a line level to mic level attenuator and then plugged into the preamp and recorded right back in and then I took that newly recorded signal and routed it back out through the attenuator into the preamp and recorded it back in and I did this several times to really emphasize any of the coloration that the preamps impart on the sound after 10 regenerations and listening to that audio file there wasn't any noticeable difference in the sound quality on any of these audio interfaces so I took it even farther and I went 50 times now at this point they were all still relatively authentic to the original signal but there was some noticeable differences between them the SSL 2 was the most transparent even after regenerations the newly recorded signal was indistinguishable from the [Music] [Music] original the L connect 6 audient id4 beher UMC pressus Studio Motu M pronus Revelator audient Evo and ape boom had a little bit of noticeable coloration but it was extremely subtle and the M AUD air and focus right Scarlet Gen 4 had the most coloration but it still wasn't very much the Focus right Gen 4 had the most and here's how it sounded compared to the original [Music] [Music] recording now the next most important thing for me is the ease of use a fact of life that I've just learned to live with is sometimes I make mistakes so so some of these audio interfaces will help me avoid making mistakes by simply being easier to use having real-time analysis meters of the audio signal that's being recorded in helps me analyze if there's signal present and what the level is of the signal the audient ID series as well as the audient Evo series don't really have any useful real-time analysis metering to tell you what's being recorded in but most of the interfaces do have at least some level of real-time analysis I like having front panel controls so I can just quickly make adjustments and I can even just glance down at the interface and see what the settings are some interfaces will use a single rotary knob that can toggle between multiple different adjustments and that's okay I don't mind those as long as whatever is being adjusted is clearly indicated the apig boom uses a single rotary knob and it's not very clear what you're adjusting so you basically have to use the software whenever you're using the apag boom but the L connect 6 also uses a single rotary knob and it's very clear what you're adjusting there's various controls that all of these interfaces will have such as your microphone gain level or adjusting between line input microphone input or instrument input and the two basic ways of controlling all these parameters are to either have knobs and buttons on the front panel of the interface or to use software or some interfaces will have a hybrid where you can use software for the more advanced settings and they'll have some of the more basic settings on the interface itself software controls are great because you can get more advanced functionality you can have multi- Channel mixers effects and dial stuff in a lot more precisely but the disadvantage to software controls is the constant cycles of computers updating their operating system and then you got to update theof software to keep up with the operating system and eventually it's inevitable that the manufacturer just won't keep updating the software so one day you'll upgrade your operating system and then you just won't be able to get that audio interface to work anymore I've had a few audio interfaces in which this has happened to me so audio interfaces that don't rely on software controls like the Behringer UMC 204hd the Pressa Studio 24c or the ssl2 ssl2 plus they don't rely on any software so you're never going to run into that issue now one exception to this and these guys deserve a shout out for doing this is metric Halo even their first audio interface that they released in 2001 still works on Modern computers and modern operating systems so good job metric Halo so another feature that I consider to be fairly important is the direct monitoring when it comes to latency there's basically two groups of people people who use direct monitoring and have no problems with latency and then there's people who monitor through the DAW and these are the people who are often more concerned about latency now if you're just recording an instrument like guitar or piano or any midi instrument you can get away with a little bit more latency like 5 to 10 milliseconds is perfectly fine it won't affect your performance so in these cases you usually won't have any problems monitoring through the Daw but for vocals it's a different story because even the tiniest little bit of latency will cause a delay in the sound that you hear because when a vocalist hears themselves they hear themselves from two sources they hear their vocals acoustically as it travels through their head and into their ears and then they also hear the signal coming from their headphones and if there's just the tiniest bit of delay in the signal coming from the headphones when those two sound sources mix together it'll cause what's called comb filtering here I'm going to play some white noise and I'm going to duplicate that white noise and add a small amount of delay to it and I'm going to play it together with the delayed duplicate so that you could see the frequency response graph and also hear for yourself what these tiny amounts of latency are doing to the sound quality quite often in studios vocalists will remove one ear cup of their headphones so that they can hear themselves better and that only happens when there's a little bit of latency in the signal that they're monitoring now it is possible to have absolute zero latency and the way that you do this is to have an entirely analog signal path so it's basically instantaneous from the time the sound hits the microphone until it goes through the system and back into the ears but with most of these audio interfaces even when they use direct monitoring the sound passes through the digital conversion which adds a tiny little bit of delay usually around 1 millisecond in my own Studio I have a completely analog monitoring path my preamp is a cranborne audio Camden and it's got two outputs so I use one of the outputs to send the signal to be recorded into the DAW and I take the other output to send the signal to this little mixer where the artist has complete control over their own mix and because it's analog there's absolutely no latency and vocalists never remove an ear cup from their ears while they're recording that just doesn't happen in my studio because they can hear themselves very clearly now I tested the Laten of direct monitoring on these audio interfaces and there's actually two of them that have an entirely analog monitoring path that's the Behringer UMC series and the m audio air the monitored signal never goes through the digital conversion on these interfaces and therefore they provide truly zero latency monitoring all of the other interfaces do pass the signal through the digital conversion and of those interfaces the one with the lowest direct monitoring latency is the rme baby face Pro which has 0.3 of a millisecond at 44.1 khz sample rate and the highest latency was the ape Boom at 4.8 milliseconds at 44.1 khz now a quick little trick if you want to get lower latency values is to record at a higher sample rate if you double the sample rate you'll get half the amount of latency with direct monitoring and if you're monitoring through the Daw you'll still get lower latency but if you monitor through the Daw the latency that you get is based more on your computer than the interface itself so I can't really do a comparison of those latency values I have an entire video on latency so if that's something you're interested in learning more about you can check it out right there also with direct monitoring there's various ways of controlling the mix that the artist hears most of these audio interfaces use a blend knob that just Blends the volume from the input and the volume from the Daw so you can dial that knob to get the right balance blend knobs are more common with interfaces that have less than four channels of inputs but when you get interfaces that have more inputs and outputs then they'll usually have more advanced software controls the worst interface for controlling the mix balance is the universal audio volt series all they have have for direct monitoring is an onoff button so it's hard to get a balanced mix with those interfaces and the best one was the Lu connect 6 this guy right here it has two headphone outputs and full software control for custom mixes for each headphone output as well as EQ and compression which you can put on the mix now there's also some things that I consider to be a little bit less important for instance the sample rate that these can record at all of these can record at 96 khz about half or actually most of them can record at up to 192 khz but 192 khz is pretty pointless unless you want to record things that are like outside of the range of human hearing or scientific testing or like I mean it's got its purpose but for a home recording studio it's not going to give you better sound quality and then there's the quality of the converters which I don't really think is all that important now a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one and I actually used to be in the camp I used to think converters were really important but after I show you some of the test results it's quite clear that even the lowest quality Converters on any of these are still extremely good and there's no audible difference between those the lowest quality ones and the highest quality ones of all these interfaces here I'm not saying there's no difference at all I tested them all and there are some differences but that difference is just so small it's not discernable so let's take a look at the tests I did the main test that I did to reveal the perceived sound quality is the same as I did with the preamp testing I just sent a signal out the line output and recorded it back into the line input took that newly recorded signal sent it out recorded it back in sent it out recorded it back in did that multiple times so after 10 regenerations and listening to the audio files on none of these audio interfaces could I hear any difference at all between the newly recorded signal and the original so that's why I say like there's not a significant difference in the quality of the Converters on these just to push it even further I took that signal and regenerated it 100 times and at that point there is an audible difference the SSL 2 audient id24 and pronus Revelator had almost no noticeable degradation it was barely audible even in critical listening the L connect 6 and baringer um C 204 had very slight degradation the Pressa Studio 24c audient ID and ape boom had easily noticeable degradation and the Focus right scarlet and Motu M2 had a little bit more degradation the audient Evo and m audio air were actually quite distorted however with only 10 regenerations the degradation was still [Music] [Music] inaudible [Music] [Music] I also tested the frequency responses of these headphone outputs and they were all within 0.5 of a DB of being perf perfectly flat throughout the audible range the Motu M2 had the lowest noise floor and the Behringer UMC 204 HD had by far the highest noise floor but in normal listening even this was not noticeable there were significant differences in the maximum volume of the headphone outputs though now there's two reasons why you might need a louder headphone output the first reason is if you're using High impedance headphones like 100 ohms or more those types of headphones are inherently quieter so you need a stronger headphone output to drive those headphones to normal listening levels the second reason you might need a louder headphone output is if the audio interface uses a blend knob for direct monitoring because a blend knob only gives you a percentage of the volume from each source so you have to make up for it by cranking the headphone volume up a little bit more when I was recording a rock band with the audient EVO 4 even though I was using normal low impedance headphones I just couldn't get enough volume for the artists to hear themselves clearly I had the headphone volume maxed out and the artist was still asking for more volume and I just had to say no can't give it to you sorry I also tested the headphone outputs for perceived sound quality and long story short there is no perceivable sound quality difference in the headphone outputs of any of these audio interfaces okay now you might be thinking I've gone completely crazy and to be honest when I first conducted this test I was a little bit suspicious of that myself because I thought for sure that I would hear some differences between these so let me tell you a little bit about my testing method I made a little switcher switch switcher switch switcher roui I don't know what to call it um little button so you plug your headphones in right here and then it's got two inputs which I was plugging into the headphone outputs of two different audio interfaces and this switch would just switch between them so in my testing station I set up two computers with identical sound files and then I would meticulously volume match to make sure those sound files are being played at the exact same volume out the headphone outputs of each audio interface and then I would just make sure I hit play at the exact same time on both audio interfaces and use my handy little switcher here to switch between them and it would switch seamlessly from one to the other as I listen to the sound files and I've listened very closely and still could not hear any difference between any of these headphone outputs so just to make sure that I'm not going crazy I also had three more people perform the same test and do critical listening of all these headphone outputs if you really take the time to balance the volume between the ab comparison there's no discernable quality difference that I was able to detect between any of these things I couldn't hear any differences so what' you think there's no there's no audible difference between any of them another aspect that I consider to be a little bit less important and again this is going to be controversial but I think dynamic range is not so important so what dynamic range really is what it boils down to is it's the noise floor of the converters now some of you might be thinking no Chris that's not what dynamic range is dynamic range is the maximum range from the loudest Source it can record to the very quietest Source it can record how much range is there between those two and yes that is what dynamic range is but the very loudest source that any of these audio interfaces can record is the same it's Z DB full scale now there are audio interfaces that can go above Z DB and they record in 32 bit but that's opening up a whole another can of worms and it's for another video for all practicality in this video all of these interfaces can record to a maximum volume of zero dbfs so the only way to increase this range is to lower the level of the quietest source that can be recorded and the limitation for the lowest volume that can be recorded is the noise floor of the converters normally the noise floor of the converters though won't have any impact at all on the sound quality of your recordings you see there's two sources of noise creating a noise floor there's your converters and there's your preamps and most of the time the noise floor of the preamp is going to be much higher and is going to drown out the noise flooor of the converters and that's why the noise floor of the converters doesn't really matter but sometimes it does matter you see the noise floor of the preamp it fluctuates as you turn the gain up and down but sometimes if you turn the preamp gain way down then the noise floor of the preamp will drop below the noise floor of the converter and then it's the noise floor of the converters that are producing the predominant noise floor in your recordings but it's very rare for the noise floor of the converters to be a problem because most of the time if you're turning the preamp gain way down it's because you're recording a source that's really loud and you're still going to have an excellent signal to noise ratio the only time the converter's noise floor will be a problem is if you have your gain turned way down and you're also recording a very quiet Source see normally if you're recording a quiet Source you have the preamp gain turned up and then the noise floor from the preamps is going to drown out the noise floor of the converter so it's not a problem but on the rare occasion you might be recording a very quiet source with your preamp gain turned way down only if you're also recording a very loud Source in the same take so sometimes you might be recording a source that varies wildly in its volume like a vocalist that goes really loud and really quiet or maybe drums or some instruments like bag pipes go really loud and well they don't really go quiet actually but for the most part it's fairly rare that you're going to encounter these situations that vary drastically in volume and for most of the time in the recording studio it's the noise floor of the preamps that you're going to be fighting with and that's the reason I put a lot of emphasis on the noise floor of the preamps because I consider that to be a much more important factor here's my measurements of the dynamic range of these interfaces the best two were the apy Boom and the audient id24 these were considerably better than the others because they are the only two that have dedicated line inputs in other words the line inputs don't go through the preamps all the other interfaces use LINE inputs that do go through the preamps including the audient id4 which otherwise has the exact same circuitry as the audient id24 now what's up with dedicated line inputs for some people this is going to be important for other people it's not going to be as important if you plan to use a dedicated external preamp then you're going to want to get an interface that hased dedicated line inputs what that means is it's a line input that goes into the audio interface and gets routed directly to the analog to digital converters it does not go through the preamp and the interface you see a lot of these interfaces when you send them a line level input what it does is it attenuates that input down to microphone level and then sends that signal through the built-in preamp and then to the converters so it goes through the preamp anyways so if the audio is being forced to go through the preamp then that defeats the purpose of using a dedicated external preamp the whole point of an external preamp is to use it instead of the built-in preamps not in conjunction with them so I have this camera here and it's got a pretty good lens on it but let's say I went and bought a more expensive lens because I like this lens better than this lens so the way this works is you would just pop this lens off and then you could put the new lens on Boom but imagine if I wasn't able to take this lens off and I still wanted to use this lens well then I would just have to find a way to mount this lens on top of that lens and that would completely defeat the purpose because I wouldn't be able to get all the benefits of this lens cuz it's the light is still passing through this lower quality lens and that analogy is what it's like with these preamps and if you're using an external preamp you're not going to get all of the benefits of it if the audio still has to pass through the interfaces built-in preamp so if you're going to invest in an external preamp it's important to make sure that your interfaces preamps can be bypassed so it can be kind of tricky sometimes to tell for sure if the line inputs are dedicated or if they force the audio through a preamp but usually not always but usually if an audio interface has these combo Jacks for inputs then it does force the audio through the preamps an exception to this is the SSL 12 which uses combo inputs but when you select line input it bypasses the preamps but the ssl2 and ssl2 plus when you select line level it just attenuates the signal and then sends it through the preamps now there are some ways that you can tell for sure that the signal does bypass the preamps for instance the universal audio volt 4 and volt 476 line inputs 3 and four don't even have preamps on those channels so those inputs just go directly to the digital converters also the audient id24 it has balanced send and Returns the returns are dedicated line inputs any signal going into those gets routed directly to the analog to digital converters without going through the preamp so what about connection type there's USB 3 there's Thunderbolt USB 2 which one is the best and you know for most home Studios it's not going to make a noticeable difference some people say Thunderbolt is faster and it has lower latency well I mean it's not actually fast the electrons move at the same speed regardless of the connection type Thunderbolt does have higher bandwidth but that doesn't make it faster or that doesn't give it lower latency that just means it's capable of more channels of audio simultaneously going in and out of the computer the original analou Orion used USB 2.0 and it could stream 32 channels in and out of the computer simultaneously with no problems USB 3.0 can handle over 100 channels and Thunderbolt can handle several hundred channels simultaneously if you're monitoring through the Daw then with Thunderbolt you might get like one or or two milliseconds of lower latency just because Thunderbolt is a little bit more efficient in how the computer processes the information but that one or two milliseconds isn't going to make a significant difference so for most home Studios any of the connection types will work just fine so I'm going to talk about various audio interfaces now and I'll give you my thoughts on them we'll start with the nyman mt48 I've used and tested this audio interface and I did an entire review video on it you can check that out right here but I'll just give you the summary the built-in touch screen is fantastic it gives you a lot of advant controls that you would normally need software on the computer to do so with all the controls being on the interface itself that gives this interface an element of being future proof because it doesn't rely on software the preamps cannot be bypassed the line inputs are forced to go through the preamp it has excellent digital expansion options with wordclock synchronization capabilities and can stream a maximum of 32 channels in and out of the dah at 48 khz sample rate but only 16 channels at 96 khz it can receive up to eight channels of digital audio through 8 at 48 khz sample rate but at 96 khz that goes down to only four channels as far as sound quality it was about middle of the road the preamps had a noise floor of 6.95 which is good but it's not great and considering the high price tag of this unit I just didn't really think it was worth it so overall I scored the mt48 as being below average the ssl2 and ssl2 plus these are some of my favorite audio interfaces they have excellent sound quality they're easy to use and I've been finding it reliable I've been using this as my backup audio interface for a couple of years now now whenever I'm out traveling this comes with me the preamps are extremely transparent measuring a noise floor of only 5.25 which is up there with some of the best preamps available and they've got this 4K mode which adds a nice character to the preamps as you can see the 4K mode boosts the treble and looking at the harmonics the first spike is the test tone and you can see that there's some nice even order harmonics added there overall these SSL interfaces are fantastic quality at a very reasonable price point I like SSL in general I think they make excellent products and my next big Studio purchase is actually going to be an SSL pure Drive octo it's an 8 channel preamp and I want to use that as my main Studio preamps the universal audio Apollo twin it's an audio interface and also a DSP processor and this audio interface is more expensive than most of the audio interfaces and the reason for that is cuz most of the cost goes towards the DSP processing aspect of this interface what DSP is is it stands for digital signal processing and it's got some computer processing chips in it that are designed to process Universal audio's plugins and universal audio does make excellent plugins for professionals it might be worth investing in them it comes with a handful of really good plugins but most of the plugins that universal audio has you have to buy them and they are a little bit expensive but I actually don't think they are expensive because it's a one-time purchase and then you have them for Life a lot of other plug-in manufacturers go with subscription models and you have to keep paying if you want to keep using them and in the long run those are actually more expensive if you don't have an Apollo twin you can still have access to the universal audio's DSP processing by buying their satellite DSP processor and it gives you all of the same plugins which you can inst St sheet in the Daw the main purpose of the DSP processing is to offload processing power from your computer onto the interface or onto the satellite card which is what I have and this frees up your computer a little bit so that it can handle larger projects the advantage of having the DSP processing as part of the audio interface as opposed to being just the Standalone satellite unit is it gives you access to Universal audio's plugins in real time for direct monitoring so you can add Reverb compression or EQ to your headphone monitor mix or the one effect that can be the most handy is guitar distor you just plug your guitar in direct record the DI signal and you can monitor your guitar playing with a software amp emulation and that is a nice feature but it's not completely necessary like I don't even have that in my own Studio here I use metric Halo interfaces which are capable of very similar DSP processing as the Apollo units but I just don't use it because I use an entirely analog monitoring path and I think the advantages of the analog monitoring outweigh the advantages of being able to have DSP on the signal there's no word clock synchronization so if you're using the digital inputs you have to use the external device as the Master Clock so if you change your sample rate in the Daw the interface won't automatically switch and follow it and also if the external converter has a lower quality clock it'll lower the sound quality across the entire audio interface it has an excellent software mixer which can provide two independent Q mixes but it only has one headphone out so you would need to use a stereo pair of line outputs for the second q miix but are those features worth the extra expense of the universal audio Apollo for some people they are but for a lot of Home Studios that are on a tight budget it's probably not worth it the audio interface component of the Apollo twin is excellent the preamp gor a noise floor of only 5.7 and overall you can get great sound quality with this unit the only thing that really sets the universal audio Apollo apart is that DSP processing so if the DSP processing is something that's worth spending the extra money on for you then yes I do recommend it it's an excellent interface and that DSP processing is great but if it's not something you really need then I would suggest not spending the extra money on it you can get just as good of sound quality with other audio interfaces the Focus right Scarlet series Focus R originally released the Scarlet Generation 1 sometime around 2012 I think maybe 2011 but anyways the first generation Scarlets were junk they were not very good the preamps were noisy the converters weren't good I do not recommend recording with a first generation Scarlet but on the second generation they nailed it they got great sound quality the second generation preamps had the lowest noise floor of all of them and then the later generations got noisier each time the third generation measured a noise floor of 6.95 and then on the fourth generation this one here I measured a noise floor of 8.8 now it's got the air mode right here which is really cool it's a button that you can press for different characters on the preamp and it's got three different modes it's got off where there's just no character at all and then there's green Air mode where basically it's a steady but significant boost of the treble frequencies and then the yellow air mode which Scoops down the mids and boosts the base boosts the treble and adds some nice even order harmonics you can see on the harmonics analysis the first spike is the the test tone at 498 HZ and the subsequent spikes are the harmonics that are generated I like the green mode on vocals because I usually boost the treble on vocals anyways but it's not really any different than just boosting the treble with an EQ in your Daw the yellow mode however is different than what you can do in your Daw because the harmonics are generated through analog components and I find saturation to be one thing where plugins haven't quite caught up to what analog gear can actually do so the yellow air mode is quite nice on some sources but it's not something you would use very often overall I would rate the quality of the Scarlet series as average the universal audio volt series these are simple easy to use and have excellent sound quality the preamps measured a noise floor of 6.25 which is above average and they also have their vintage mode which boosts the base Scoops out the mids boosts the treble and adds some nice even order harmonics you can get the volt series with or without the built-in compressors which are based on universal audio's 1176 compressor so for instance the Volt 2 doesn't have the compressors but the volt 276 does have the compressors same with the volt 4 and the volt 476 the built-in compressors are nice for live sound situations like live performances or live streaming where you can't really go in and adjust the settings on the Fly you just push a button and it's automatically set really well and you'll have the compression you don't have to worry about it it just works but if you're recording and taking your time to mix in the Daw I would rather not use these compressors and just use a software compressor plugin so that the compression isn't baked in and I can tweak it as much as I want the one thing I don't like about the volt series and I mentioned this already is with with the direct monitoring it's just an onoff button you don't have control of the levels but overall they have great sound quality they're easy to use they're an affordable price and I would rate them as being above average all right let's take a look at the apog boom I honestly was not impressed with this interface it uses a single control knob on the front panel and it doesn't really tell you what you're controlling you actually can't even control a lot of the settings from the front panel you need to use the software and it's just not very intuitive it's not laid out very well and the sound quality wasn't even all that good another thing I didn't like about the apog Boom is when you plug the headphones in it mutes the line outputs so you can't just leave your headphones plugged in and then switch between headphones and your speakers cuz yeah they won't both work at the same time the sound quality of the apog boom was average at best I don't know not even overall I would rate the apog boom as being below average the m audio air series I kind of liked these I mean there's nothing special about these but its Simplicity is what I liked about it like it's just really straightforward all your controls are right there and it's got the best feeling knobs if that counts for anything and yeah the sound quality was decent the price tag is reasonable so overall I would rate these as being average and let's take a look at the audient Evo series oo the sound quality of this unit punches in above its price point it's actually quite good but overall I didn't really like using it because it's just not very intuitive like what does this button do what does this button do what does that button do you have to read the manual to know how to use it the audience Evo series preamps have a noise floor of 6.95 so I recorded a rock band with it and yeah I had to read the manual to figure out how to dial in some of the settings and then a month later I was using this audio interface again for something and I forgot how to use it I had to read the manual again and the software controls are maybe a little bit better but not much I mean the software controls are just a picture of this audio interface it looks the same and it still isn't very well labeled as far as what the controls do it has this button right here for auto gain you just push the button and it samples the volume level coming into the preamps and and automatically sets the gain now I think this is a pretty useless feature I mean maybe on the EVO 16 that has more inputs and outputs it might save some time but really it doesn't save any time because you still have to double check all your gain settings and possibly adjust them to make sure that they're actually set properly so it doesn't prevent you from needing to learn how to set your gain and honestly setting your gain is so easy anyone that's past kindergarten can set your gain I've got a whole video on how to set your gain if you're interested in that but the Evo 16 is a different story it uses independent headphone channels so does not mute any of the line outputs when you plug the headphones in excellent full-featured software mixer that's capable of four independent headphone mixes plus a main mix it also has 16 channels of Adat digital expansion and it even gives you word clock synchronization capabilities which is really nice to have when you're using the digital expansion priced at $550 the Evo 16 offers excellent value for everything you get and you can expand it with the audient evo sp8 8 channel preamp converter and then those cost about $500 each so together with two of those plus the interface you're looking looking at a total price point of $1,550 for a full Studio setup capable of 24 channels in and out all channels having preamps and it's excellent quality so if you want a high Channel count studio and you're on a bit of a tight budget that's the setup that I would recommend the pronus Revelator right here and the pronus studio series I've got it right here the pronus Revelator had a noise floor of 7.8 and the pronus studio 24c I measured a noise flow of 6.35 technically these have the same preamps so they should have been the same but they did produce different results pronus makes pretty good stuff it's not the best at anything but it's not the worst either I'd say it's middle of the road um the Revelator uses their universal control software which is really good it's easy to use and it has some really great features on it the studio 24c is all front panel controls it doesn't rely on software which is a good thing it's really simple and easy to use has real-time analysis overall it's a great little interface again nothing amazing about it but it's not bad either so I rate it as being average the Steinberg Ur series these had the worst preamps of all of my tests but other than that they're a good interface they're reliable and they're easy to use they're priced a little bit high in my opinion so overall I would rate them as being below average the metric Halo ul8 and leo8 these are the interfaces that I use as my main audio interface in my studio they can accept a card in the back for customized input and output options and multiple units can be Daisy chained together and your dog will see them as a single interface within the software you can create as many aux buses as you want and give each aux bus its own custom mix and you can route anything anywhere it's got extremely flexible routing options it's also got built-in DSP so you can add effects to your direct monitoring like Reverb delay guitar Distortion and the ul8 built-in preamps measured to noise Flor of 5.8 which is pretty good overall I would rate the metric Halo interfaces as being above average and now I'm going to announce the winners in some of the categories so category for Best Value goes to same as last year the Beringer UMC 204 HD and the Behringer UMC Series in general Behringer has two different levels of quality that they offer their interfaces in there's the UMC series and the um series I think it is basically the ones with the Midas designed preamps are the good ones the ones with the xenix preamps are junk stay away from xenix preamps but the Midas preamps these are really good preamps and overall like I did a lot of tests and it's an overall excellent sounding audio interface and what I like the most about it is its price T it's only like 120 bucks us so it's very affordable excellent quality all of the controls are on the front panel it doesn't rely on any software so that makes it future proof on the baringer UMC series I measured a noise floor of only six so yeah it's just a great little interface for20 bucks and the winner for cost No Object best sound [Music] quality it's the audient id24 and really it's the audient ID Series in general they all use the same preamps the same converters and they give you the same level of sound quality quality but this one here has a couple of features that make it stand out to me um particularly on the back it's got digital inputs with word clock synchronization you can synchronize a word clock through the word clock output or through the optical output so there's two options for that plus it's got balanced send and returns which the reason this is really nice I mean yeah you can add outboard gear but the reason I really like this is because the balanced returns act as dedicated line inputs so you can plug an external preamp into those and it will bypass the internal preamps of the id24 and that's why if you're using an external preamp it's important to have those dedicated line inputs although with the audient ID series these built-in preamps are so good you'd be hard pressed to find an external preamp that outperforms them the audient ID series interface has measured a noise floor of 4.55 this is on par with some of the lowest noise external preamps available not only were the audient ID series preamps The Very Best of any audio interface I tested but they also had the best average performance of all the other tests combined even when compared to some much more expensive interfaces and then the winner for the best features goes [Music] to the L connect 6 you know this one surprised me CU they call this a two channel audio interface but it's so much more than that it's got well it's got your standard two inputs but it's also got an input for a mobile device so you can plug in an iPad directly into this and record the digital signal it never does go analog log and I've used it it works really great um it's also got an ox input so just an 8inch stereo connector you plug that in and it'll record the stereo signal um which is really handy like if you have a client coming in and they've got their song on their phone you can just plug in like a standard 8inch cable into the headphone output of your phone plug it right into there and record directly or you could just plug it into the mobile input which um actually happened to me I was using this interface I had a client coming into the studio and it was 15 minutes before they were sched to arrive and I just had this idea This little light bulb go off and I'm like hey I'm going to use the L connect 6 for this so I pulled it out of the box connected it to my computer for the first time took me probably 5 minutes to take it out of the box another 5 minutes to download the software about 2 or 3 minutes to figure out how to use it it was really simple really straightforward I was so glad cuz I I didn't have to struggle with anything with the client I also used the connect sticks to record a whole rock band and it went really smooth you'll hear the recording in just a minute here but I just want to point out that like this was only done in two takes the first take I recorded drums it was a midi drum kit just plugged into the USB port of the computer and bass guitar and rhythm guitar and then the second take I recorded lead guitar and vocals so this whole song was recorded in only two takes and it took like maybe 10 [Music] minutes still TR the Dan FL lost inside our I feel help but I this interface has a really great built-in mixer where you have full control of all of your levels you've got compression and EQ that you can instantiate on the headphone monitor mixes it's really intuitive the realtime analysis works well and the single rotary knob clearly displays exactly what it's adjusting also as a bonus the sound quality of this unit was really good the preamp scored a noise floor of 5.85 which is among the lowest noise floor of any of these audio interfaces and still beats a lot of Standalone preamps the line inputs and outputs all scored really well the headphone output scored really well although the volume of the headphones was fairly low but because it doesn't use a blend knob it's got a full mixer it's more than enough volume and it's got two independent headphone outputs so I was able to send separate mixes to the artists as they were recording plus it's got several channels of loop back recording and I just think i' a price point this level of features is unheard of in any other audio interface and then there's one of these interfaces that stood out to me as being the worst and this one actually surprised me because I had high expectations for this and it's a brand that I like and I respect so with uh with a heavy heart I announce the Motu M2 I'm sorry Motu but I can't lie and I have no control of what the tests reveal this audio interface simply performed below average in most of the categories not the worst but just below average and like the preamps had a noise floor of 9.3 which is the second noisiest preamps the line inputs and outputs weren't that great the headphones were actually the best and I really like the real-time analysis on the metering on this it's got the best real-time analysis but there was one specific thing that stood out to me that makes this interface not usable just one of the other tests I did revealed it and I tested all of the interfaces for this um and now this is something weird but but it's it's credible because I performed this test several times and with different testing methods and always got the same results so but I noticed when I was testing the Distortion levels of the microphone inputs of the preamps I noticed I was getting different readings based on the volume of the headphone output now I don't know how they're Associated but when I tested all of these interfaces actually most of them had the same thing when you turn the volume of the headphone output up all the way now on all of these other audio interfaces some of them didn't do it at all some of them did it a little bit but the Motu M2 did it quite a bit when you turn the headphone volume up all the way I was noticing a lot more distortion on the microphone [Music] inputs I produced a test tone and recorded it back in going through the preamps and then in the Daw I used an EQ to filter out the original test tone so that you can just hear the Distortion being created here's what it sounds like with the headphone volume at [Music] zero and here's what it sounds like with the headphone volume at maximum so as you can see and hear there's quite a bit of distortion being created on this audio interface's inputs when the headphone level is turned up I don't really know why that is but I don't like it cuz when you're recording you're using that headphone output you need to hear yourself and so it's going to create Distortion in your recordings no good so hopefully Motu fixes that in the future and yeah I'm really sad to announce that one as the worst audio interface but it is what it is and I'm going to tell you guys the exact same thing that I would tell any friends of mine coming into the studio that's one of my like little tests that I uh like a little litness test for myself is am I saying the same thing on my video that I would tell to a friend of mine who comes into the studio and asks about these interfaces and so I make sure that I always do tell you guys the same thing so if I were buying an audio interface with a $200 budget I would buy the Behringer UMC 204hd if I were buying an interface with a $300 budget I would buy the L connect 6 and if I had a $400 budget I would buy the audient id24 so I hope you found this video helpful hit the Subscribe button I got a lot more videos coming check out get beautiful recordings on Facebook and if you're curious about whether or not power conditioning will improve the sound quality of your recordings you can check out this video right here e

Channel: Get.Beautiful.Recordings

Views: 200,606

Keywords:

Id: gMuA-2FbJxE

Length: 45min 5sec (2705 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024