What are some of the features that make or break your decision to buy interfaces? Are there any gold standard examples of products already out there
#Features to look for in interfaces?
silk pike
brisk scarab
This certainly isn't useful for everyone, but a welcome addition is always an insert. If you have external hardware you want at the beginning of the signal path, but after the preamp, this is the only place you can drop it in with an interface.
Larger consoles and pretty much all old analog consoles provided these so your cool dynamic controls could be dropped into the channels you wanted.
Having things like compression in the interface is fine, but what if you want your favorite old hardware compressor in there in particular?
stark flicker
Number one would be required number of channels. I only buy the channels I need so that all the price is going on components I'll use ie no point buying an 8 in/out box if you'll only ever need 1 channel. #2 for me is longevity/support.
strong summit
- Reliability, if an interface fails in the middle of a concert that I’m recording its game over 2. What is the manufactures support record, will I have drivers for 4,5 or 10 years? 3. The quality of the preamps/converters, 4 expand ability and future proofing GIVE ME A AUDIO NETWORK OPTION PLEASEEEEE :):):)
wintry badger
Midi
late epoch
Quality of the preamps and Loopback are the features I care about the most.
copper valley
ever since getting one with a playback/monitoring mix knob, it's a must
stark flicker
In terms of one type of gold standard....metric halo interfaces are built on a modular hardware principle, meaning you can pay a relatively small price and swap in a modern connector, upgrade the conversion, clocking etc or add preamps etc. They still fully support every box they've made over the past ~15 yrs and plan to do so into the future.
That's a pretty good gold standard....if ya drop the gold 🥇
crystal badger
My go-to on an interface for me is just, well, how the preamps perform. It's why I have the AIR 192|4, and despite the issues it has, the preamp noise is so absurdly low it helps me a lot with dynamics. There's definitely better options, though, especially in terms of I/O. The AIR kinda falls flat there, and it's more or less only good for plugging in a mic, headphones and maybe speakers.
Another thing for me would be good drivers - the AIR suffers from instability and some strange headphone out quirks when using the standard M-Audio drivers, at least from the last time I've tried them. Switched to ASIO4All and almost all issues disappeared. The headphone out is far cleaner, too, which is strange cause JK measured it to not work that well with low-impedance headphones. Asio4All is worth a punt if you have an AIR and you want some issues to disappear. Whether or not it'll cause you more pain down the line entirely depends on what you're planning to do with it.
coarse cliff
How many girls it can pull.....