Thu Jul 16, 2020 5:53 pm
Munsterorganist,
You might be interested to read this article from Sound on Sound, a magazine aimed at musicians of all types using electronic equipment. I'm afraid I don't know when it was written - it may be old as there is a photo of a Focusrite Saffire, which is a piece of equipment that I bought many years ago and used until it died, and which is no longer available. I replaced it with an audio interface by RME, and then another one my MOTU, supplemented by a DA converter by Behringer to increase the number of channels (I currently have seven stereo channels plus a subwoofer, feeding Behringer Truth active monitors in quite a large room in my home). I can't say that I noticed a huge difference between any of them, although I was quite surprised to hear a worthwhile improvement in sound quality when I upgraded from HW4 to HW5, much more than between the different audio interfaces that I had tried.
I think the bottom line is that past a certain price point they all do the same job fairly well, and all the ones suggested in the HW manual are capable of functioning in a fairly realistic-sounding system. Of course a professional recording studio would use quite different and much more expensive equipment, but they have different requirements.
When I was younger I was quite interested in the difference between different HiFi systems, though I couldn't afford the silly prices of "audiophile" equipment, and I never understood some of the fashions, such as drawing a ring round the edge of CD's with a green marker pen which was somehow supposed to help them to be read more accurately, or how a digital recording could be improved by pressing it onto vinyl, which as far as I could see simply introduced an additional stage for errors and distortions. These days even low-end systems are consistent and much better than they used to be, though alas at the age of 59 my hearing isn't what it was.
Of course as Iain Stinson points out, recordings made with the in-built Hauptwerk recorder don't involve the sound card or audio interface at all.