Best soundcard to buy?

[Jamie Cropley]

Which is the best external USB soundcard to buy for ableton live suite?

Many thanks.

[jestermgee]

there isn’t a “best”, almost any will be worth while. The differences will mainly be with features and IO.

What’s your budget?
What’s your OS?
What input/output features do you need?
Does it need to be portable?

[Jamie Cropley]

Any amount.
Windows 10 Home
Any as I use Speakers usually anyway.
Ideally portable yes.

[Jamie Cropley]

Any amount.
Windows 10 Home
Any as I use Speakers usually anyway.
Ideally portable yes.

[jestermgee]

Then any sound card would be best.

[Jamie Cropley]

thanks

[TLW]

Take a look at the RME Babyface. RME drivers are very good low latency ones and they tend to support their older products for a long time.

[Skrzat]

But I'd suggest you take a deeper look into Babyface PRO, as it's still on their current interfaces list. Original BF1 isn't produced anymore, but still supported. Anyway, BF Pro is just better, nicer, faster, more comfortable. You check the difference and decide. IF you're a musician and play acoustic instruments, then DON'T buy BF1 because instrumental input impedance isn't sufficient for acoustic instrument pickups (guitars, violins and so on). BF Pro has the standard 1Mohm input impedance. Otherwise if you're short on money, you can consider BF1, cause it's still great piece of equipement and still supported and has no competition in driver latency and stability, unless we're talking about the really expensive gear like $5k and more.

[Shift Gorden]

I just got the new UAD Apollo X4 - I absolutely love it. Like, I really LOVE it.

Portable, sounds great, I can link to my Scarlett 18i20 via ADAT, and the console software is brilliant.

[zsazsa]

- Prism Atlas
- Ferrofish A32
- Antelope orion 32hd
- RME M-32 DA Pro 32 plus the RME M-32 AD Pro

Are probably ok for any budget.

But on a more serious note.
You haven't said what you want to do with it.
If portability is a thing I'd say go with the RME Babyface pro. That is bus powered.
If you only want to have stereo output, no input, you could go for the RME ADI-2
And RME are reliable, great drivers, very loooong driver support and no marketing BS.

[Gregory Wells-King]

If I had some savings and I could sneak one past my wife.

I would go for the original Arturia AudioFuse. I.e the smaller of the current gen.

It has all the connectivity and the performance I need for my set up and style of music, more importantly would cover everything for both live and studio use.

That’s just me though.

If your intentions are to set up a big studio to capture live set ups. Then It probably wouldn’t have the configuration you want.

[TLW]

DON'T buy BF1 because instrumental input impedance isn't sufficient for acoustic instrument pickups (guitars, violins and so on). BF Pro has the standard 1Mohm input impedance.

Good point on the original BF being discontinued - I hadn’t noticed.

As for input impedance my UFX is 470KOhms on the pre-amped front line inputs. Can’t say I can tell much difference between that and 1MegaOhm, though I rarely use it for guitar because I don’t like amp/fx sims.

A lot of highly regarded guitar pedals have surprisingly low impedance inputs or buffers - the Tube Screamer and SD-1 (which the Screamer is kind of a copy of or is it the other way round...) are 470K on the buffer input. Fuzz Faces are notoriously low input impedance, which is a big part of why they work as they do. It also means they’ve always been true bypass because otherwise they’d kill the “clean” signal. As did old Cry Babies.

[jonljacobi]

You'll get almost as many answers here as there are interfaces. Think of your I/O needs, check the forums for outrageous bugs, then buy accordingly. There's a ridiculous amount of hype out there and while I'm sure there are a couple of cheap clunkers out there, I haven't heard anything I thought sounded bad in a very long time.