Best USB interface for £100

[tigerflystudio]

Ok, got about £100 for a new USB interface. I make indie / rock / folk / country music and record as a 1-man-band, so here's the simple things I need it to cover :

- 1 guitar / bass input (TS or (ideally) TRS)
- 1 XLR input
- 24-bit recording
- 1 set of either RCA's output, or (ideally) digital coaxial output

So, please let me know your suggestions for what interface I can / should get, or anything that should be avoided (i.e. I already know the basic M-Audio FastTrack is useless because I've got it & the latency is VERY bad because of its very poor drivers).

Any help finding a decent low-cost but solid perfoming USB interface would be great - I'd rather get the opinions of you 'users' out there rather than trust the 'friendly' sales-folk.

Cheers

 

[dgatwood]

Assuming you're on Windows, be sure you're using the ASIO drivers from M-Audio. If you are, then I doubt you'll get much improvement by changing interfaces. If you're unable to get the latency down to an acceptable level with one USB device, you're likely to be unable to get it down to an acceptable level with any USB device. The problem is more likely poor interrupt routing or too slow a CPU than the drivers for the audio interface. USB isoch is pretty drop dead simple.

As an experiment, you might try removing the M-Audio drivers entirely and using the built-in Windows USB audio class drivers with ASIO4All. If you aren't able to get acceptable latency that way, you can probably rule out M-Audio's drivers safely.

In cases where one USB device has failed, your best option is usually to buy a FireWire card and a FireWire interface. Sticking with USB is likely to be throwing good money after bad, IMHO.

If you're on a Mac, then yeah, M-Audio's drivers suck really hard (or at least their FireWire and PCI drivers do—I've never tried their USB drivers). Again, I'd probably delete them and try using Apple's USB audio class drivers. They're some of the best USB audio drivers out there, IMHO. You might not get all the device-specific features, though. Either way, that should tell you whether it's the drivers or something else.

 

[tigerflystudio]

Cheers - that makes a lot of sense. I've tried the M-Audio drivers and the ASIO4ALL drivers, too. Neither have made the latency any better, though.

So looks like I'd just be throwing money away on a new USB interface if the current FastTrack won't work properly?

Weirdly, if I record using the fastTrack, the latency seems so slip longer and shorter randomly as the track progresses. Is this a normal latency issue behaviour?