[Bob Simon[_2_]]

On Wednesday, July 3, 2019 at 12:28:51 PM UTC-5, Mike Rivers wrote:
On 7/3/2019 12:37 PM, Bob Simon wrote:
I am getting ready to buy my first audio interface. With no digital recording experience, I need some advice on monitoring overdubs.

Do you have any experience recording, particularly with a computer, and
doing overdubs? You have a good reason to be concerned, but it's good to
know how much you already know.

Mike, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. In particular, I note your favorable impression of the latest generation of the Scarlett.

All my recording experience up till now has been analog only and all my equipment is at least 20 years old. I have a Tascam M-1516 board and TSR-8 tape deck along with a small rack of Proteus sound modules, effects, and a compressor. I'm semi-retired now (with a background in network engineering and VMware) so I have the time and interest to upgrade my studio for digital audio recording.


I had been looking at the Focusrite Clarett 2Pre Thunderbolt audio interface (connected to my HP Spectre x360 with Thunderbolt 3) because it has especially low latency in hopes that I would be able to monitor my live overdub tracks via the DAW. However, Focusrite Tech Support suggested I get the USB version of the Clarett instead because there are problems with the Thunderbolt implementation on some Windows machines.

Thunderbolt on PCs is really rare. I can't offer you any personal
experience because it's so rare that I don't have one myself. I wish it
had been better adopted and was as mature as it is on the Macs (though
Apple is starting to drop it them selves) but I'd consider the
alternatives. I just got a press release yesterday for the 3rd
generation Focusrite Scarlett USB interfaces that have upgraded preamps
and lower latency with USB than previous versions. The Scarlett's no
slouch. I have a review of the first edition on my web site, and I can
tell you that, using its built-in DSP monitor mixer, I measured less
than 1 ms of latency from mic input to headphone output, and that's
certainly good enough to work with, even for recording vocals.

Since my HP has Thunderbolt, latency using it would be significantly less since Thunderbolt has direct access to the PCIe bus. USB requires the signal to traverse a USB controller. But given the uncertainty of how well HP implemented Thunderbolt in my machine, I'm persuaded to use USB 3.1.

information on recording and monitoring snipped

If that's true, then the Scarlett 4i4 would work fine and provides two additional preamps. Or since I plan on initially using the free version of Studio One, maybe it would be better to get the PreSonus Studio 26c or 68c, which are only $200 and $300 respectively and come with Artist.

PreSonus interfaces are pretty good, but if you're concerned about the
quality of the mic preamps, which I suspect you are since you were
considering the Clarett, I'd lean toward the Focusrite.

I had imagined that there might be work flow benefits if the interface and DAW were made by the same company. No? In any case, it sounds like you believe that any such advantage is small compared to the better quality of mic preamps in Focusrite interfaces. Did I interpret that correctly?