I am about to buy the recording setup of my dreams......last minute sanity check that there is not a better option out there for me.

I will add to this that there is much more involved to getting a good recording of a drum kit than just inputs.

Acoustic treatment and good monitoring or don't even try is my motto. If you don't look into that, you will never understand and fight to get good recordings. It is inexpensive to do basic things, but no interface, mic or mixer is going to fix the room you are in or what you are hearing. Just sayin...
 
One good thing is that you can always get the Presonus, start doing some recording and if you are getting the results you want, you can add the Behringers later. If things don't sound right, then you can work on any issues. It's not as if the ADA8200 won't ever be available again.
 
I now use vsti drums, and drag out an electronic kit if they need to be really played rather than keyboard bashed. I do it because in all my years, squeezing a drum kit into a small room sounds less than good. Without a good space that is big enough and treated properly it’s so hard to make them sound good. Close miked drums in a big space, even a reverberant one sound so much better. One of my old studios had a room big enough to record drums, but still not nice really.
 
One thing to consider since I haven’t seen it mentioned yet, is that the presonus you’re looking at doesn’t have direct monitoring. I was giving it a serious look last year and that was the biggest complaint that I noticed. Basically, you would have set up all cue mixes using input monitoring in the DAW which will introduce latency. Now, in may not be much and I know thunderbolt is supposed to be really fast, but it will still be there and it was a common user complaint. It could be problematic when tracking a full band as well as some types of overdubs. Personally I kind of like it on vocal because gives me a kind of slapback that is more comfortable to me when singing with headphones. I absolutely struggle, however, when tracking bass and trying to lock into the kick drum. Sure, you can make timing edits but that just feels sinful.

Another alternative at the exact same brand new price would be an audient iD44. (Full disclosure, this is what I went with and I freakin love it so I may have a bias.) Now, it will give you four less input but you will still have a total of 20. However the 4 you get are pretty damn good and the first 2 have a really good DI as well as fully balanced insert sends and returns. Returns can also be used as a straight path to the converters if you ever want to add a high end preamp etc. In return for giving up 4 inputs you also get full function monitor control with controls for alt speakers, cut dim, and talkback. The talkback uses any mic connected to the computer including the built in mic on your MacBook. There also two independent headphones outputs that you can route a number of mixes to. As far as direct monitoring is concerned, there up to four separate cue mixes that can be routed to any of the outputs including the beringers. There are other interface options with direct monitoring as well, I’ve just been really impressed with the iD44. It does come with Cubase LE and some other software goodies but I don’t use those.

Other than all of that, I’ll just echo the others on treatment, monitors? Headphones and headphone amps for the band? Happy hunting
 
With a well designed Thunderbolt 3 system, you shouldn't have to worry about latency in monitoring. Besides T-bolt 3 having about 80 times the bandwidth of USB 2.0, it has direct access to the PCI Express bus, rather than relying on the polling system that USB uses. That means it can dump data directly, faster and without having to wait for the system to "come back to it". That's one of the fundamental advantages of Firewire/T-bolt vs USB. Since it was a proprietary system owned by Intel, most PC makers avoided it rather than have to pay royalties to Intel. WIth T-Bolt 3, Intel decided to forego the royalty to get it more widely adopted, and it was basically married into USB 4.0.

If I was buying today, I would move to Thunderbolt.
 
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TalismanRich said:
With a well designed Thunderbolt 3 system, you shouldn't have to worry about latency in monitoring. Besides T-bolt 3 having about 8 times the bandwidth of USB 2.0, it has direct access to the PCI Express bus, rather than relying on the polling system that USB uses. That means it can dump data directly, faster and without having to wait for the system to "come back to it". That's one of the fundamental advantages of Firewire/T-bolt vs USB. Since it was a proprietary system owned by Intel, most PC makers avoided it rather than have to pay royalties to Intel. WIth T-Bolt 3, Intel decided to forego the royalty to get it more widely adopted, and it was basically married into USB 4.0.

If I was buying today, I would move to Thunderbolt
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Well there you go! That’s good to know. I know with FireWire, even at the lowest buffer settings, I had trouble tracking bass. So when I saw that complaint come up repeatedly in reviews I decided to look elsewhere. Pretty sure the audient is usb 4 but I only use input monitoring for logic instruments. That aside, I still think the monitor control aspect of the iD series is worth a look. Especially if working with other people
 
According to Audient's website, it's USB 2.0, just using a USB-C connector.

USB2.0 High Speed:

No. of INPUT CHANNELS 20:(4 Analogue, 16 Digital)
No. of OUTPUT CHANNELS 24:(8 Analogue, 16 Digital)
Connector:USB Type-C
Included Cables:1.5m USB 2.0 Type-C to USB Type-C, 1.5m USB 2.0 Type-C to USB Type-A
 
Firewire - Thunderbolt? Where does 'Dante' fit in with all this? I am confused by all these trendy standards.
It looks easy to spend money on something that will go out of fashion.
 
Its not a case of "trendy standards" as much as an evolution. Just as we had 500MB hard drives running at 5400 RPM 20 years ago, that's considered junk today. You can get terrabyte solid state drives that store 2000 times the data and access it 200 times faster.

Firewire and USB2 are 2002 technology. Firewire had two iterations, 400Mbps and 800Mbps. USB 2 is 480Mbps, and USB 3.1 (2013) jumped to 10Gbps. Thunderbolt was designed to handle even higher data rates. Current Thunderbolt 3 is 40Gbps capable using multiple channels. USB4 standards were adopted in 2019 and were included in the Thunderbolt 3.

Dante is an ethernet IP based audio system. While you can do Dante via software, this requires significant processing at each node, which results in latency. To do things properly, you need to go with proprietary hardware based Dante equipment. You can buy Dante devices from lots of companies, but they ALL must use Audinate's chips for the implementation of the system.

Dante is great for accessing multiple devices and has lots of capacity for handling audio, you can send data directly from your computer to a active speaker system all over ethernet cable. It tends to be more pricey than Thunderbolt or USB devices. You are locked into a single supplier which carries some risk.

Thunderbolt and USB are essentially open standards now, so implementation should be more widespread. Windows PC have been slow to implement Thunderbolt, but those chips are becoming more common on motherboards. Its already in Apple Macs. USB4/Thunderbolt 3 is now being implemented on AMD processors. It's simply a more capable protocol than USB2.
 
mjbphotos said:
My point was that in a basement not otherwise set up for recording, $1200 is not going to go far, so think where you can save money. Do you need a separate mic on every drum and cymbal? Do the singers really need to track live with the band?
A big drum kit, bass, up to 3 guitars, keyboards - how large is your basement? What's the ceiling height? What acoustic treatment do you have or are you planning on?
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That ^ and STILL no mention of monitors. To mix the sort of band OP is envisaging will need something pretty serious in terms of bandwidth and level and that budget might just buy one!
I know some people will say "it can all be done on cans" but I doubt that and in any case, you need to blow a significant amount to get 'reference' quality headphones.

Dave.
 
I went back to FireWire in my audio studio when I got a new very old stock interface, and I knew the PC had FireWire as I used it previously for video. I’ve never had any issues with latency, and read the terrible stories about how people just can’t play because latency is over a certain figure. Very often these are people used to playing on large stages, where the real latency between the keys player and the bass player is high due to distance. They can play then!

I do understand. My piano playing colleague struggles if a piano latency is over 5 or 6 mS, I don’t notice till it gets to around 10 or so.

Dante makes me smile. People get so excited about it. Sure, it’s clever, and really useful, but to me it’s like getting excited by MIDI, DMX, ADAT or other protocols, including usb and FireWire. The beauty of Dante is just the ability to send and receive audio data just by selecting channels. You can stick a rack of preamps somewhere and pick them up in a front of house console, but also the OB truck, the monitor desks, and anywhere else you fancy. Sort of plug and play, almost.
 
TalismanRich said:
Its not a case of "trendy standards" as much as an evolution. Just as we had 500MB hard drives running at 5400 RPM 20 years ago, that's considered junk today. You can get terrabyte solid state drives that store 2000 times the data and access it 200 times faster.

Firewire and USB2 are 2002 technology. Firewire had two iterations, 400Mbps and 800Mbps. USB 2 is 480Mbps, and USB 3.1 (2013) jumped to 10Gbps. Thunderbolt was designed to handle even higher data rates. Current Thunderbolt 3 is 40Gbps capable using multiple channels. USB4 standards were adopted in 2019 and were included in the Thunderbolt 3.

Dante is an ethernet IP based audio system. While you can do Dante via software, this requires significant processing at each node, which results in latency. To do things properly, you need to go with proprietary hardware based Dante equipment. You can buy Dante devices from lots of companies, but they ALL must use Audinate's chips for the implementation of the system.

Dante is great for accessing multiple devices and has lots of capacity for handling audio, you can send data directly from your computer to a active speaker system all over ethernet cable. It tends to be more pricey than Thunderbolt or USB devices. You are locked into a single supplier which carries some risk.

Thunderbolt and USB are essentially open standards now, so implementation should be more widespread. Windows PC have been slow to implement Thunderbolt, but those chips are becoming more common on motherboards. Its already in Apple Macs. USB4/Thunderbolt 3 is now being implemented on AMD processors. It's simply a more capable protocol than USB2.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the explanation. I stand educated.
 
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