Jeff Livingston
The hardest part of educating yourself on audio interfaces is finding a good source of info. There's plenty of recording studio sites but all you find when you search are sites trying to sell them.
These were the best resources when I was hunting for the best audio interface in my budget. I needed to know how many inputs & outputs I wanted, what kind of audio cables & computer cables to use, Firewire or USB, etc. There's a lot we need to know, but thankfully these pages make sorting it out real simple.
Your goal will determine what you need. Are you a rapper, singer, or podcaster? You can get away with a single channel or two to accommodate yourself and a friend with a microphone or instrument each.
An audio interface is a piece of hardware that expands and improves the sonic capabilities of a computer. Some audio interfaces give you the ability to connect professional microphones, instruments and other kinds of signals to a computer, and output a variety of signals as well. In addition to expanding your inputs and outputs, audio interfaces can also greatly improve the sound quality of your computer. Every time you record new audio or listen through speakers and headphones, the audio interface will reproduce a more accurate representation of the sounds.
Learn why a good audio interface is essential to producers for reference, recording and expanding your recording setup with multiple inputs and outputs. The digital audio interface translates binary information into audible information so you can hear it.
An Audio Interface is a device that connects musical instruments and recording equipment, such as microphones, with a computer to allow musicians to record their source sound. In this addition to the ‘buyers guides’ section of our website, we will shed light on what an audio interface is, what it does, why you would want one, and which one you’re going to need.
Audio interfaces and video interfaces define physical parameters and interpretation of signals. For digital audio and digital video, this can be thought of as defining the physical layer, data link layer, and most or all of the application layer. For analog audio and analog video these functions are all represented in a single signal specification like NTSC or the direct speaker-driving signal of analog audio.
Today I’ll explain what an audio interface does, its main purposes and the reasons we can’t use our default windows or mac audio card for music production purposes. Let’s start by giving a simple and non-technical definition of what an audio interface does.
The main question I'm asking is: what's the difference between a mixer (either w/ or w/o built in audio interface) and an external audio interface? A friend of mine uses his Behringer XenyX 802 mixer as a way to input the signals his mic's send into GarageBand/Logic (kind of DAW is irrelevant). Now i've been wanting to set up my own little home studio myself and basically every tutorial/video out there says: "in order to record multiple instruments into your Mac, you need an audio interface."
Can anyone explain why my ears get sore and tired when listening music for long periods on my Sennheiser HD-25 headphones through Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface? I notice it immediately that when I switch the connection to the normal computer headphone jack I can listen to longer periods without my ears aching. I'm not making this up as I bought the interface mainly to improve my listening experience
Audio latency is the invisible destroyer of the peace and efficiency of recording engineers everywhere. Newcomers don't realize it exists and when they encounter it they're not even sure what to call it. What is this fiendish problem and how is it typically solved?
