Ableton Forum

Here's the criteria,

Excellent sound quality
Small and portable
At least 4 outs, but the more the merrier
and affordable

I forgot to say it for gigging with Live!

motu ultralite for the quality: www.motu.com
echo audio for the price: www.echoaudio.com

no NI or M-Audio!
not worth the money imho. both use generic drivers on win and mac, which is normally no problem on mac but can be on win.
i would say with NI/M-audio the chances are 1:4 for problems:no problems.

M-Audio and NI do NOT use generic drivers on windows and the whole point of core audio on Mac OSX is that it's a generic protocol designed for low latency (some interfaces make better use of it than others).

ASIO4ALL is a generic windows driver. M-Audio and NI write their own specific drivers for their hardware, as do most audio card manufacturers. Sometimes their drivers are not great (M-audio in the past are guilty of some woeful drivers, but seem to have improved of late. Native Instruments drivers however have been typically very good or excellent). You can use asio4all as a substitute and sometimes it works better than the native driver.

It depends on what you need as to what i would recommend. SF's recommendation is good for DJing and live performance. If you are planning more on just studio use, I would look at something which has at least a couple of XLRs with reasonable preamps for recording condenser mics. There are USB and firewire options. On a Mac firewire is fine, PC laptops tend to suffer with cheap integrated firewire chipsets by ricoh and o2, which are not designed for pro audio performance.

BTW - The Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1 is one of the best performing USB2.0 interfaces on windows with very low latency and great drivers - only drawback is it has limited I/O.

leedsquietman wrote:BTW - The Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1 is one of the best performing USB2.0 interfaces on windows with very low latency and great drivers - only drawback is it has limited I/O.

yup, the OP asked for a cheap, simple interface.. for mainly gigging / DJ use and for that NI cards are right now the pretty much best choice for the money all around on both windows and OSX. good to very good sound, very well physically made, light, small and sturdy and good stable low latency drivers.

for primarily studio use, as leeds mentioned, i also would look for a card with at least TRS or better XLR connex, high-z ins, etc... but that will cost the OP a bit more then the price range he asked for.

the audio DJ 8 is also, besides the limitation for studio use, having only RCA connections a fidelity wise superb 8 I/O card for only 400 euros.

omg wrote:motu ultralite for the quality: http://www.motu.com

+1

The Ultralite is a quality interface, but when the OP writes affordable as a criteria, the Ultralite might be a bit more than he is prepared or able to pay.

Then again, you could argue you get what you pay for...

Thanks for all your input. It's just for gigging by the way as I have an interface for my studio. After considering further how my live set up will be, I now have some further criteria to narrow it down.

It must be firewire, as I need both other usb slots on my macbook and I don't want to dick about with usb hubs.
It doesn't need any extra frills, fx etc.
Just good sounding, sturdy and 4 ins and outs (at least)

I think the echo audiofire 4 looks like the best option for me.

Is there anything rivaling that?

What about the Focusrite Saffire Pro 24? Anyone tried it out? Or know about it?

MOTU Ultralite.

Another +1

TC Electronic Desktop Konnekt. You search hard enough and you can find them for $169. Done deal my friend.

Every manufacturer has problem units occasionally and sometimes users think the unit or drivers are at fault when it's something else in their system that's the culprit.

With that out of the way I'd like to issue a caution on the popularity of MOTU.

I've got an Ultralite Hybrid and it doesn't work using USB 2.0 on my Vista 64 system. Firewires o.k. Other people have the same issue. Others don't. fair enough it's a new unit except the worrying thing is I've had a 'techlink' on their system for 3 weeks now and it hasn't even been read yet. There is no official forum or e-mail address. The I've been on to the dealer/distributor for my territory twice in a week. they promise to look into it and all back. Then don't.

So they have a problem somewhere.

If I had my chance again I'd go Focusrite or TC-Konnek although to be honest I don't think there is as big a difference in sound quality as some people think over cheaper models from the likes of M-Audio. Who also have a good on-line support presense and replace faulty units quicky and without quibble.

MOTU is good with MACs 'cos that's what it was designed for and you get good (DP alike) software. Not for windows.

this again ?

RME FF400