Hello kr,
I prefer the RME interfaces, they have several things going for them -
- high sound quality
- stable drivers
- low A/D and D/A delays
- low-ish latency operation compared to others
- Totalmix
- they write their own interface chip (usb or pcie), it’s highly optimized for what they do.
However there are many good interfaces out there depending on what you need.
“Latency” is a red herring in many ways and folks throw the term around. It’s composed of several things (simplified explanations) -
- Input A/D time
- Input DSP time
- serialization time (conversion to protocol)
- interface buffer time (usb or?)
- input latency buffer (time in memory for cpu to get to it)
- DSP time in daw, varies
- output latency buffer (time in memory for cpu to get to it)
- interface buffer time (usb or?)
- de-serialization time (conversion from protocol)
- Output DSP time
- Output D/A time
(for you tech nuts, there are more steps, that’s a simplified version). Some are very fast, some are not. The latency reported to the OS/daw may or may not encompass all of those minus the daw dsp time of course. My point in bothering to write all this is if you’re getting only 1.5ms in and 3.2 ms out, and that was your only delay, it would be pretty good, but it’s not the only source of delay.
Also, running at 32 samples only works some of the time depending on your session, especially on a Mac - PCs with the same approximate load can operate at lower latencies, usually. You need an interface with a DSP mixer so you can monitor the input, not the through-the-box output, when recording. Then you can run high latencies and give your cpu a break. I apologize if this is basic and you’re saying “do you think I don’t know that?” I never know.
Note - Macs don’t have Direct Monitoring like PCs do thanks to Apple’s not bothering to issue APIs for it (technically a manufacturer could start the standard on Macs but no one has and probably won’t, that was a discussion on developer boards for a number of years). Therefore you’ll use your DSP mixer in your interface to do the Direct Monitoring manually.
Hugh