Audio Interfaces: Things You Need For A Home Studio
- Michael O'Connor
- Sep 6, 2022
- 3 min read
Of about equal importance to needing recording software for your home studio, an audio interface is also essential to building your home studio. This is the thing that will allow you to record using a microphone, instrument or line cable, and in most cases MIDI. You’ll plug your mics and cables into it along with your headphones. In this article, we’re talking about all things audio interface!
What Makes Audio Interfaces Different?
To be honest, interfaces may be the last thing that you want to consider when trying to improve your sound. Nowadays the tech is so good, and for “cheap”, that the differences are really minimal!
The Law of Diminishing Returns certainly applies here; you’re going to be paying a lot more for a lot less improvement! The key differences in cheap vs high end interfaces are the quality of preamps, and the AD/DA converters.
So when you’re singing into a microphone, the energy produced by it is very low; so, to get a nice clean signal, you’ll need to make that signal bigger. The purpose of the preamp is get the level up to a suitable level to be converted into digital to be read by your computer. It really is just making the signal bigger!
Doing so is pretty straightforward; there’s not much to it. You can either go for a super clean sound, or a very colored sound. Preamps can also have varying levels of signal-to-noise ratio, meaning some may have more or less “hiss” or white noise than others.
This was more of a concern in the earlier days, but now we’ve got such great quality electronics for the cheap there’s very little difference between high-end and low-end preamps!
The AD/DA converters are what change the analog signal to a digital one, and vice versa. Again, not much difference here, especially when it comes to being able to do quality pro work!
The biggest differentiator in audio interfaces is the amount of inputs and outputs you can have; that’s really all to it! There’s so much fluff companies try to sell you on but in reality, all you need is an interface. Hell, I used a live board as an audio interface to record a whole album! Did it make a huge difference? Nope! Is there any noticeable difference when comparing a high-end interface to the live board? Probably not!
What Audio Interface Should I Get?
It really comes down to how many inputs do you need, and what connections you have on your computer. If you’re recording drums, you might want 8 or more, or at least 4. If you’re doing say acoustic guitar and vocals, or stereo recording guitar, you’d want at least two! If you’re only making beats and rapping over it, one input will be enough! Just make sure you plan according to where/how much you want to grow!
Some interfaces are USB, others firewire, some thunderbolt. Choose the one that can connect to your computer, and hopefully something that won’t change over time; firewire is or already is getting outdated, so look into USB or Thunderbolt!
Portability might be a factor you want to consider as well. If you want to do some work at a coffee shop or on a plane, go with the smallest one you can find! Usually will have to be a one input device.
In the end, all that matters is if you can get a signal into a computer and play it back. That’s it. For the most part, the differences in cost don’t justify the improvement in quality; your money is definitely best spent elsewhere!
All the best,
-Michael
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