Best sounding Audio Interface?

[Doc Jones]

Originally Posted by MonkeyMan

Nice one Timo. The RME seems to be out in front all round at the moment. I suppose now I need to source a cheap one!

Keep your eye on ebay - I see a few pop up there quite a bit. Of course, there are a lot of people who want them so the price goes up, but every once in a while someone puts one up with a buy it now that is much less than if you were to buy it new.

[MonkeyMan]

Nicely diagnosed Doc. The cheapest I have seen an RME Fireface 800 (new) is ?815 from Thomman. Can this beaten anyone?

[~+?]

Get the RME, the build and workmanship is second to none, can only be described as engineering excellence! "BBC"

[The girl next door]

Motu 828 MK2...Were happy with ours and it's 500 euros cheaper than the Fireface 800.Unless you need so many I/Os
All the stuff on our website was done with the 828 (But do take into consideration that it is internet quality)

[ZEBASTIAN]

you can always keep your current soundcard and use the spdif out with a dedicated DAC such as Apogee minidac/ benchmark dac 1. and some of the RME themselves.
or you can use a Presonus Central Station s DAC...for what i understand it sounds amazing..

[Tomer=Trance]

but then you will be losing the capability of multi channel recording\convertion.
you need a card that can handle ADAT such as some of the RME cards for instance.

[SupaSandeep]

RME Fireface! I've never seen anyone not like it, also I've seen the least amount of complains/problems with them... The response on the fireface lead me to buy a Multiface II and I absolutely love it

[adsr]

it's open for debate, but i listened to rme multi-face, benchmark, apogee, lucid, lynx, digidesign, motu...pretty much everything i could and found the lynx 2 sounds most like the high-end stuff in terms of clarity. i was also looking seriously into ramsa which is panasonic's high-end and a friend of mine who's a studio recordist [does large orchestral work] really felt that they were tops for 2k. i wasn't certain about the osx drivers and support w/ the ramsa, so i went w/ the lynx 2.

i didn't consider m-audio or other lesser quality cards for studio rig. my mobile setup uses a firewire m-audio thing which is fine for live--very stable/reliable, knock wood

[MonkeyMan]

Wise choice. From what I have read the Lynx II is a fantastic sounding interface. Shame it is only PCI (I have a dualcore Mac with it's PCI-express) so that's one off the list for me.

Now leaning firmly towards the Apogee Ensemble - when it comes out.