New Interface

lukicore

Member
Hi all

So im about to buy a new interface I want something witg good preamps I dont have money to buy RME so you know .....
Right now i use presonus audiobox and UR44

Any recomendation ??

And whichis better sm57 or e906 ?????



Thanx
 
Are you just recording electric guitar amps? (guessing from mic question)

Why do you think you need better preamps? The interfaces you have should be ok and typical of what you get in the entry price points.
 
Presonus preamps are a long way from the worst, I find them quite good and very good value for money. SM57 or e906? The are both good, depends on personal choice if its guitar cabs.
 
If you are concerned about the quality of your recordings, the interface is low on the list of likely causes of unsatisfactory quality.
 
The UR44 has four mic inputs so I doubt the OP just wants to record electric guitar?

I am not aware of any AI vastly better than the UR44 untill you get to RME or other exotica? Eevn then, as said, not likely to make a huge difference to sound quality. The logical upgrade would be for more channels? Get an AI with ADAT then buy the Berry 8ch pre amp, maybe with a view to upgrading that sometime? Or, the 44 has two line ins, 5&6, maybe a "better" pre in there or a channel strip?

Butty,but,but..if I had the 44 and wanted to spend money it would be on monitors and of course, room treatment.

Dave.
 
Agreed, none of the preamps in the interfaces that I've used have been disappointing. They're all low-noise, pretty flat, with enough gain and headroom to handle a range of input sources. None of the ones that I've tried would be any sort of impediment to creating great tracks.

After doing a bit of a shootout, I found the Focusrite preamps to have a bit more "air" to them but less headroom than the others. Roland preamps are kind of boring but with ample headroom, which is good for most home recording. Steinberg has similar preamps to the Roland, just less headroom. Behringer's Midas preamps are surprisingly good, and they come on some of the most affordable interfaces on the market. And RME's preamps are in a different league, but can sound a little too articulate for their own good, depending on your intentions.

That's my 2 cents, anyways.
 
I'm really just not interested in any single item to improve quality, and that should perhaps be 'quality', as so many so called quality improvements are tonal in nature. I have decided that real quality improvements need to be across the board, and the real killer improvement is not technical at all, it's the space. So many good microphones that could make a quality difference, but can't, because the NEED a good space to work in. Monitors that can actually reproduce the quality differences, and for me, at my age, ears that can hear the magic extra frequencies you are recording. Budget equipment is so good now, compared to twenty years ago that we should have a quality difference that has got better by a big jump, but it hasn't. When we talk about 'air' what exactly in technical terms are we talking? I have a strong suspicion we are just talking about the small differences a hump in the frequency response causes, and is that really a huge quality shift, when eq can do very, very similar things. Buying a Neumann U87 microphone is NOT, in my humble view an increase in quality, it's a positive jump in tone. In my studio, with OK monitors, and OK interface with an OK acoustic treatment and ok microphones, I would need to consider which one I could spend some money on to improve the quality of my output. Over the years I kept adding microphones expensive sample and synth packages and quality improved, but then topped out. I think that to improve my sound in a way that can be evidenced by the end product, I need to increase the size, improve the acoustics, and alter my mic distances. I can't put the mics back a bit, because the room intrudes, so maybe the better sound of my double bass from just an extra foot of distance cannot be tried. We all work within a constraint of some kind, and while money is usually the decider, we always have space issues, working from home.

I do know that sometimes, my opinions get changed by trying things forum folk suggest, but very rarely do the spending money things really work. The Shure SM57 is a very good example of this 'quality' thing. By any measurement system, it's not a good microphone, yet we reach for them so often because they're probably the most useful mic in our collection. So using a frequency limited, peaky frequency response, fairly insensitive dynamic is a quality improvement? In real life I think it is!

Anybody have a definition for quality that makes sense? I don't think I have any more?
 
"Anybody have a definition for quality that makes sense? I don't think I have any more?"

I have one Rob. "does the reproduced sound bear close resemblance to the original instrument as heard in the room, e.g. the bass"?

That was the definition of High Fidelity but of course, THAT lot have become as mad as a box of frogs.

If you have a system that can reproduce speech at real life volume and convince people it is a real person speaking you are well on the way to "perfect quality". Any deviation from that and we are in the realms of subjective judgement and YOUR quality is as good as the next blokes.

After a repro system that can do accurate speech (or any other instrument) the next step on the road to "quality" is creating a believable acoustic "place" where each instrument exists. In other words, monitors that give a great stereo image but in this world of overproduced "pop" and 98% of listening done on buds, where is the incentive?

Dave.
 
I'm really just not interested in any single item to improve quality, and that should perhaps be 'quality', as so many so called quality improvements are tonal in nature. I have decided that real quality improvements need to be across the board, and the real killer improvement is not technical at all, it's the space. So many good microphones that could make a quality difference, but can't, because the NEED a good space to work in. Monitors that can actually reproduce the quality differences, and for me, at my age, ears that can hear the magic extra frequencies you are recording. Budget equipment is so good now, compared to twenty years ago that we should have a quality difference that has got better by a big jump, but it hasn't. When we talk about 'air' what exactly in technical terms are we talking? I have a strong suspicion we are just talking about the small differences a hump in the frequency response causes, and is that really a huge quality shift, when eq can do very, very similar things. Buying a Neumann U87 microphone is NOT, in my humble view an increase in quality, it's a positive jump in tone. In my studio, with OK monitors, and OK interface with an OK acoustic treatment and ok microphones, I would need to consider which one I could spend some money on to improve the quality of my output. Over the years I kept adding microphones expensive sample and synth packages and quality improved, but then topped out. I think that to improve my sound in a way that can be evidenced by the end product, I need to increase the size, improve the acoustics, and alter my mic distances. I can't put the mics back a bit, because the room intrudes, so maybe the better sound of my double bass from just an extra foot of distance cannot be tried. We all work within a constraint of some kind, and while money is usually the decider, we always have space issues, working from home.

I usually hate it when someone throws perspective into the mix, but I find it hard to disagree with this one. Especially since I just spent the last four months re-treating my room and "shooting" it until my measurement mic ran out of bullets.

The room is a significant variable in determining the end result. It's also the hardest to alter physically and sometimes economically.

Having said that, I've always believed that recording output is really more like multiple linear regression. There are probably ten or more variables that impact the end result. Each of these variables contributes something, but their weighting is different for every musician and every studio. The variables begin with talent (music and engineering) and end with new strings. The complicated part is that they also interact with one another and many of them can't be measured sufficiently. This means that while we can devise a regression equation to arrive at an answer, we have no reliable or valid data to plug into the equation.

Of course, I'm an American. So I believe in the market. If you want the best mic, buy the most expensive one.:D
 
In the 90s, I built a studio - and it was in a old Victorian School building with high ceilings and plenty of space. My previous ones had all been, for practical reasons, full of treatment to solve the parallel wall problems. In this new space, I tried a new idea, because cost (within reason) and timescale of construction was quite fluid. We built the walls individually and built an oversize ceiling in panels with an MDF lower surface that we could simply lower onto our walls. We tried it on the recording area first. We stood up the walls, and pulled them in and out, changing angles and facing directions, then with pulleys from the metal tie-bars, we lowered the roof panels onto the walls. We then used a battery powered Hi-Fi to play test tracks and a snare drum. It was so strange. Kicking out a wall by just a few inches, and pushing in another made a very obvious difference. When we found what we felt was the nicest sounding hard surface shape, we secured everything, bolted them together and then added the plasterboard layers on the inside, as usual. One of the 'walls' was a heavy duty double glazed patio style door. It was the best sounding room I've ever built, without any treatment, so with a little bit of tuning with proprietary products it was great to work in. We did the same thing with the control room area, which ended up rather like a coffin shape. It too had a patio door, parallel with the one in the other room, about 300mm apart. These doors worked well for visual and access reasons, but were the weak link. The sound transmission was troublesome. We tracked it down to the Metal baseplate. Using a measurement mic and headphones we hunted for where sound was getting out and while the hardwood frames left right and top were pretty good, the one that carried the weight and the track was metal, and clearly the extruded profile let the sound through. The actual frame in the tracks was well sealed, oddly - and it was just the bit you walk on to go through that leaked. Not a sealing thing, just that it let sound in and out. Not enough to be useless by any means, but annoying.

I'd absolutely do this again - because everything sounded good recorded in this room, and it was very forgiving. It was in a college - and lots of the recordings made were for exams. I'd like to think that even the weaker candidates did better in their grades because the room was so nice and forgiving. Mic positions less critical, and the layout of the things in the room not so important - and those that picked up a cheap ice cream cone shaped dynamic instead of a nice condenser got away with it!

The thing that stopped me doing it again was simply practical - nowhere to hang the ceiling panels from to allow the walls to be moved around. I don't think I have heard of anyone else do this, as it's the ability to lift off the ceiling, move the walls, then drop it down again that can't be done in most builds. I'm nowhere near clever enough to calculate this with maths, but trial and error works brilliantly - IF - you can do it.

The 'quality' increase in getting the room right was so worth while.
 
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