A couple other thoughts for people who are looking around.
- I had a consumer M-Audio interface that was always a bit weird. One day well outside the warranty period I popped the lid off and discovered a tombstoned resistor and two bodge wires on the PCB. I reached out to M-Audio on Twitter and the best they could do was offer me a $20 discount on another interface. Very unimpressed.
- I replaced it with a Behringer UMC404HD and the very first thing I did when it arrived was pop the cover off. I'm an EE by trade and I was very impressed by the design. The board layout etc was nice, but the part that really surprised me was the pre-amps for the mic inputs. Maybe I'm weird for feeling this way, but the folks who designed it have taste. The pre-amps are designed around some NJR op-amps; NJR parts are notorious for being slew-rate-limited for a lot of applications, but to my ears they sound absolutely buttery smooth. The fact that the designers used those parts instead of some jelly-bean "flat" op-amps really made me appreciate the consideration that went into the design.
Edit: and yes, I know Behringer has a bit of a reputation for being "kinda cheap and kinda crappy" but I have zero complaints and I've had this unit for a few years now.
IIRC the UMC404 was designed just after they bought Midas, and those engineers had a lot of input.
Behringer has gotten a lot better, their early days (20 year ago) they made cheap junk clones. Now they have some good gear as well.
Though the company itself has other operating practices people don't like. You should for sure do your research on them. I have some of their gear, but I'm not sure I'll buy more.
I prefer the Universal Audio Volt series over the Scarlett. Plus, if you ever think of upgrading you'll have some familiarity with Universal Audio, who is a pretty big player in this area. This is coming from a guitarist perspective, in case it matters. I really like my Volt.
What would you say are the distinguishing features between home/semi-pro/pro interfaces?
Universal Audio recently released some really nice made-in-taiwan desktop interfaces in the same price range as the Scarletts. I have scarletts on my rackmount setup, UA Volt on my desk.
UA's software is atrocious though. Their spyware DRM crashes any windows VM I try to install it on.
Scarlett's software is relatively good by comparison, although you have to start their server by hand from the terminal if you don't want it running all the time.
> What would you say are the distinguishing features between home/semi-pro/pro interfaces?
Without going into tons of nitty-gritty details, the major ones are the number of inputs/channels, size, and price.
Scarlett 2i2 is more than enough for most people, with its 2 channels (both with independently controllable headphone and monitor outputs).
Motu 828, the one listed as semi-pro tier, has 20 input channels.
I suggest reading reviews of each of them, but basically the rule of thumb is that if the review is listing bajillion things that you have no understanding of at all, you don't need that tier and can safely move to the tier below.
No shame in that at all. Even the home/hobby level of audio equipment today is functionally crazy, and priced insanely cheap compared to just a couple decades ago.
I meant more between e.g. a Scarlett 18i20 and a Motu 828.
I went with the Scarlett because A) it was relatively cheap and B) it had quite good reviews, but I'm curious what I'm losing on a technical basis by going for the $500 option over the $1000 option.
For what it's worth, I've been using a BabyFace Pro on Mac for years, ADAT-connected to an RME rack ADC/DAC to enable all available audio channels, and it's been as rock-solid as any hardware I've ever owned.
Note that, while the BabyFace Pro doesn't have native Linux or BSD drivers, it does have a USB class-compliant mode that, while feature-limited compared to the proprietary drivers, may be sufficient for DAW use — AFAIK, the primary limitation is limited control over the hardware mixer, so problematic if you need low-latency monitoring of multiple input channels simultaneously, but possibly irrelevant otherwise.
There's also a full-featured iPad mixer app that works in class-compliant mode, so full control is at least theoretically possible, lack of published details notwithstanding, and there appears to be at least some support for this in the Linux kernel,
semi-pro/more serious: MOTU 828
pro/studio level: PRISM Sound Lyra or Titan