Audio interface for DAT -> MacBook Pro Retina

Peter Tourin

New member
I would appreciate some audio interface advice for a project. I've been out of audio work for many years, so things are a world of different. This is a specific project - we have about 60 or so DAT tapes of live concerts that we played some years ago. Music is renaissance and baroque. I'd like to move them to HD and clean them up for personal listening, possibly to post some of the better takes of rarer music on YouTube.

The recordings are not of the highest quality - I simply set up coincident mics before each concert and recorded on a Sony TCD-D8 - I also have a few DAT tapes from radio broadcasts. The original Sony died - I briefly had a Panasonic SV-3800, but it had trouble playing the tapes, and ultimately it died too. I've just grabbed 2 TCD-D8's that appeared on eBay - one claims to be unused (we'll see...), but hopefully one or both will work well enough with the old tapes to get me through the transfers.

I'll be transferring onto a MacBook Pro Retina - an early 2015 model. It's a fast one with 16GB memory and an SSD, so I'm expecting no issues with it. I don't know much about Macs - I'm an IT guy but all my work has been with PC's, so this will be an adventure. I have Cubase 7.5 on the Mac - I was figuring on using it simply because I have it - haven't used it at all and don't know my way around it, but it was a freebie that came with a Yamaha SLG200 guitar <g>...

I'd appreciate some suggestions on an audio interface. I need a SPDIF in, since that's the digital out on the Sony DAT recorder. I've been looking at some of the USB interfaces since they're cheap - thinking about a Zoom U-44 or a Scarlett 6i6 since they're both compact and both have SPDIF I/O. I've looked at some of the Thunderbolt interfaces, but they're a good deal more expensive - a Clarett 4Pre is around $500.

I'd like to know if either of the USB boxes is a particularly good bet, or if somebody has another suggestion I should check out. If anybody feels that I'm going to hear big differences if I go to one of the less expensive Thunderbolt interfaces, I'd like to hear about that too - with more than 60 tapes to transfer, and possibly some more concerts to tape in the future, it wouldn't be smart to penny-pinch now and find that I need a better interface in a year or so.
 
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