Tips, tricks and tutorials from the UK’s leading distributor of music technology products. Source Distribution exclusively distributes Event, Eventide, Genelec, Lynx, Moog, Jet City, PreSonus, RODE, Rosendahl and Universal Audio.
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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
How to Choose an Audio Interface
Our tech support guru Chas offers his top ten tips for choosing an audio interface. While Chas has used some of Source’s favourite products as examples - such as PreSonus & Lynx - the same principles apply whatever brand you end up choosing. Happy shopping!
1. Type of interface
The first thing to consider is how your new audio interface will connect to your computer, and that depends on what connections you have available - for instance USB, FireWire or PCI.
Each connection method has its pros and cons but generally speaking they’re all capable of similarly high performance figures. There are various things to look out for here - for instance Firewire devices often don’t like sharing the Firewire bus with anything else, so if you already use a Firewire drive for backup or recording purposes it might be worth using a audio interface that connects in another way. If you are considering a PCI or PCIe card but you already have a lot of other similar cards such as Universal Audio UAD1 or UAD2 DSP cards in your system then simply finding an available slot can be problematic.
If you’re on a laptop then ExpressCard or USB are generally your only options, though again if you’re planning to use a UAD2 Solo Laptop card in your machine’s ExpressCard slot then a USB audio interface would be an ideal combination.
Using this criterion as an initial means of eliminating unsuitable products you should be able to narrow things down to a manageable shortlist with which to proceed…
