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Affordable soundcards (Mac)


iexist

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Can anyone recommend an affordable soundcard for mac? Been out the game for awhile and I feel like I'm looking at the same audio devices I looked at 5 years ago..

 

Looking for something to record with and stream with. Not looking for the best. Not looking to break the bank. Something simple would suffice.

 

Surely theres a diamond in the rough out there, yeah?

 

 

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avoid everything but MOTU and RME, best drivers around and wont ever need updating unless you start making music for whales dogs and bats.

 

if you cant afford new look second hand for an RME babyface or any 3rd gen hybrid MOTU

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avoid everything but MOTU and RME, best drivers around and wont ever need updating unless you start making music for whales dogs and bats.

 

if you cant afford new look second hand for an RME babyface or any 3rd gen hybrid MOTU

 

Whilst nobody's arguing the quality of an RME, is it not perhaps overkill when the original post says...

 

Looking for something to record with and stream with. Not looking for the best. Not looking to break the bank. Something simple would suffice.

 

Also, why only RME or MOTU? Why not Apogee or Prism Sound?

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i love the Apogee Duet.. its at the top of my list.. but thats a lot of cheese for a soundcard at the moment. I could buy another mixer for that price..

 

I'm digging the price of the behringer. I used to have an M-audio that worked pretty well... Dont know too much about the RME or MOTU...

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i love the Apogee Duet.. its at the top of my list.. but thats a lot of cheese for a soundcard at the moment. I could buy another mixer for that price..

 

I'm digging the price of the behringer. I used to have an M-audio that worked pretty well... Dont know too much about the RME or MOTU...

 

Yeah I agree although I wasn't suggesting you buy them, just wondered why Flexi doesn't rate what others swear by.

 

Anything from a half decent brand for about £100-150 or less secondhand would do for your situation. Personally I'd go something newer just because in my experience, some of the more recent cheaper ones have much improved latency and sound than even the the relevant previous models. This sort of technology seems to progess quite steadily.

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My opinion... Focusrite drivers are amongst the poorest for latency on windows of any consumer grade soundcard. I guess that doesn't make any difference for you, but generally would not recommend. Most consumer grade sound cards are baaaasically the same, with minor differences and driver differences - you can usually just use asio4all in most cases but you might lose some things, direct input and so on (and on Mac coreaudio takes care of everything anyway so you're good). I like the NI Komplete Audio 6, it has as good converters etc as you'll get at this level, the right ins and outs, and a nice master level control on the top which is analogue so you get nice smooth volume changes on your monitors without digital stepping. That's probably the coolest feature for a small setup, so you can adjust your monitor volume easily. It has direct monitor for inputs 1&2 as well so you can send your decks straight through to the monitors whilst recording (the only thing is the inputs are the ones with phantom power, so you either direct thru the decks or get the phantom power inputs, not both, and they're individually gain controlled which is a minor pain if you do chop and change). Aaaand it comes with the nicest software package and voucher for the ni store. I guess with some others you get ableton live lite but I'd say the ni stuff is more valuable.

 

Another thing, though - if you get a mixer with an audio interface in it you can use that, so you're putting all your money into one thing. A z2, for instance, takes care of everything. The new pioneer mixer is 300 with an interface built in which is crazy. There are quite a few options that way?

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@Rockwell

Apogee and Prism drivers cant touch RME or MOTU under stress (reaching max resources)

You can do the usual peruse of DAWbench and such to confirm, im just going by experience though, still have PCMCIA RME interfaces that perform better than brand new interfaces by every other company, and they have been updating the drivers for years, no other company released win 10 x64 drivers for 15 year old sound cards, best company by a metric mile.

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