SPL is a big name in analogue studio gear. It has two discrete mic pres, but you can also add external pres through the line-in of spdif. Something like a WA Tone Beast would be good for the vocal channel to get different colors ... yeah I know I'm spending all your money hahaha

 

Well, I can certainly understand the tendency to 'chip in' with little gems we gearsluts happen to find along the way ;)
But.. as you could've read I already bought the Steinberg and so far I'm more than pleased. I actually sold my old AI -which had s/pdif but I don't really need it as I do all my processing in the box (although the UR44 has 3 onboard DSP's (EQ/Reverb/Compression).

 

Yeah, I saw you already bought it (congratulations by the way!) but I just mentioned it for other audiosexers who will be reading this thread now and in the future Basically, what I am trying to say is people should do a lot of research, look at the features, and try to audition as many interfaces as they can. My take on the subject is just about every company out there can get their converters right these days, but what's really important is the analogue stages before the audio hits the converters. Most budget interfaces use off-the-shelf preamps and tweak them a little. SPL on the other hand have already done the R&D on previous in-house products (discrete mic pres, ADDA, monitor controllers, headphone amps) so they already had the great technology laying around.

There is nothing wrong with Focusrite, I was thinking of buying one of their interfaces too (or a Roland), but I've just had the Crimson for a few days and I am very impressed. It's hard to see how they can sell a quality product at such a good price, considering the analogue candy they have put inside it.

Oh yeah, Steinberg is now owned by Yamaha, so I am sure some of their technology is filtering through to the brand Also back in the day Focusrite were a big name in the analogue console market, and even had a certain Mr Rupert Neve working for them. They seem to be past their glory days now though, as the computer revolutions has put a lot of the old legacy companies onto the back foot.

 

Both the Focusrite and Steinberg have pretty good pre-amps. Focusrite's won some award and the pre-amps in the Steinberg are the same as found in their higher end models.
Annoying thing is everyone's setup is different so how well a driver/interface works with your system is always a gamble. This is why I'm curious about Olymoons test results.

Btw. Recentely saw 'Sound City' a documentary -basically about the studio and their Neve console- which was sold to Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters) when the studio was taken down.
The rave about that console (only 3 in the world) was interesting to see. Makes you think there really is no alternative for old school analogue gear

 

Great documentary until the end part

A few more that are worth a watch (in no particular order) ...

Artifact
New York Doll
20 Feet From Stardom
Control (film)
Muscle Shoals
Shut Up And Play The Hits
Nothing Can Hurt Me
Searching For Sugar Man
24 Hour Party People
Standing In The Shadows Of Motown

 

OK, here are the results of the test:

Computer conditions:
Processor: i7 950 @3.1 Ghz
RAM: 12 GB Corsair
Graphic card AMD Radeon 5700

Sampling Rate 96Khz, buffer size: 1 millisecond = 96 samples (Can't go under 1 msec on the driver side)

Sonar X3e results:

Input: 2.4 msec, 232 samples
Output: 3.4 msec, 328 samples
Total Roundtrip: 5.8 msec, 560 samples

Ableton Live 9.1 results:

Buffer size 128 samples This is wrong as the driver is set to 1 msec so obviously it's 96 samples ...
Input latency 3.8 ms
Output Latency 4.42 ms
Driver error compensation 0.00
Overall latency: 7.50 ms

You don't ask for it, but now that I'm on it, Samplitude: overall latency 8 ms.


All this data is taken from each DAW's preference / information window, no further test are done.

It's important to know that these data do not tell how much tracks and Vst(i) you will be able to use smoothly in this condition.

 

@Olymoon. Thanks!

Interesting to see in your config Live 9 also has higer latency values. Btw. I also took my readings from the DAW's information window.

Do you mean this in relation to the fact sometimes DAWs give wrong readings?
Reason I'm asking is because I have this weird issue in Sonar (as opposed to you here in Live) where I set the samplerate in the DAW then open the Steinberg Yamaha driver window and I always see 44.1 kHz no matter which rate I choose in the DAW.

I can then manually change it, the values in Sonar change accordingly but when I close the driver window it pops back to 44.1 kHz. In Live 9 both settings match automatically Now I don't know if the readings are off or that in fact the samplerate can't be set correctly.

 

The issue that you describe may be due to driver/DAws shacking hand ability.
Usually it is solved when dev update the drivers .

One workaround for this is to try to change the card driver's sampling rate before opening any DAW, then in the DAW change the sampling rate.
And/or, prepare a template in your DAW with the desired sampling rate, save it. Close your DAW. Open your soundcard's driver change sampling rate accordingly. Then open your daw directly to this template.

With Focusrite drivers , it's the DAW who's in charge so you can't change the sampling rate if your DAW is open and is not configured with the right sampling rate. But if you change into your DAw, the driver change automatically.(As far as I could try) Even so, in samplitude, I got strange behavior when changing sampling rate, all notes are transposed depending of the change, that shows that the shacking hand between Driver and DAW is not accurate.

One note about sampling rates, working on higher sampling rates will give less latency (If your computer can handle the calculation)and is suppose to give better sound. But there are a lot of dev that do not work on jitter problems so their higher rates are not necessarily as good as you may expect.
This is an important parameter to take in account when you decide at which sample rate you are going to work.

 

Thanks. Will def look into it.
Alas today it's sunny wheather in the Netherlands so I'm off to the beach. Will check in later with my findings!

Btw. I realise no one is working with 192 kHz. It just makes me wonder why it is possible at all to chose this setting on devices for the consumer market and why it doesn't hog down my machine in the first place -with such great readings at this samplerate.

 

Happy beach day then !!!

You should try with 192khz, with 24 tracks one plugin on each, then if it doesn't hog, that's the real surprise. While there's no hard calculation it's easy to handle.

 

Live happened (as always) so it took me a while to get back to some testing. As it appears I'm an idiot and the problem's solved.

I didn't realise setting the samplerate in Sonar X meant setting the default value for new projects.
So obviously while working in older projects or even creating a new one, the samplerate settings of the driver were already set in stone and I can change it all I want, but ofcourse it keeps getting back to it's default state.

So.. obviously I won't be working in 192 kHz. I'm looking at 24/48 or 24/96 depending on latency. Kinda bummer though, since latency on 192 kHz was killer- but as you say that's on an empty project (or on 80% CPU simulation in Live).

Need to work on my theory some more.. homework ahead ;)

 

I'll give a thumbs up to the Steinberg UR44. A very solid unit at a great price.