I have a desktop I use for multitrack recording. Mostly I’m plugging basses and guitars into an old Lexicon Alpha. I’m bundling up an old keyboard with a laptop for a relative to run Cantabile and the Alpha is a good candidate for it’s audio interface.
To replace it I’m tempted to purchase an IK Axe i/o I can get for about $100 right now.
If anyone familiar with that line of interfaces who can comment would be very appreciated.
It looks like a good choice if you mostly are using the interface for guitar and bass, especially if you use AmpliTube.
I looked at it awhile back, and they were having some driver issues in Windows, per IK forum. I assume those issues were corrected. If I could get one for $100, I would have probably jumped on it.
I’ve watched a bunch of Guitar magazine/website reviews. I’m looking forward to seeing how my basses and guitars play with it into AmpliTube. This old Alpha got the job done the past 5 years.
For live Cantabile I’ve got two Behringer UMC202HD’s that I think perform extremely well considering I bought them for $60 each (one open box, the other from ebay). I’m running one of them with 64 buffers 48Khz for my drum kit - I really don’t feel any latency playing edrums through it - a few vdrums forum members claim I’m just used to it
Agreed - I always use 256 for keyboard based instruments and don’t detect any latency but for drums and guitar I like 64 buffers - the UMC202HD’s can do large Superior Drums kits with no artifacts at 64.
These use XMOS chips for their USB interface/driver and XMOS is quite good. For guitar I run a 202HD at 32 or 64 sample latency no problem. They sound fine IMO for guitar/VSTi use and non-critical recording via mic. One of the best bang/for buck out there imo. They aren’t the most refined sounding imo when scrutinized with reference cans, but for live there is little if any discernible difference compared to something more expensive imo. I’ve never had an issue playing a $3K guitar thru a $25 pedal as long as it sounded right, so no problem playing thru a $75 interface either, especially when its all about the driver for something like this, and XMOS is very solid. For reference 1ms of latency is roughly equal to one foot distance away from the sound source.
In the FWIW dept. Behringer is able to hit the price point they do on these because they are 5VDC internally for the analog sections. Something “better” would be plus/minus 15VDC for the analog sections. When using quality mics and preamps its an issue. For guitar and VSTi not an issue.
I’ve never devled into finding out why they work so well, thanks for sharing detail on the 202HD’s. I needed more headphone outputs for the one I’m using with edrums so I bought an On-Stage H4000. I don’t know why this would be the case but I think my headphones sound better at similar volume through it.
Have to preface that I’ve been using a pretty lame USB audio interface for my recording desktop (Alpha Lexicon). Just unboxed the Axe I/O and wow - there’s a big improvement for guitar and bass. The amp modeling feels and sounds more real with this interface. A really nice feature also is that when Cantabile is running I can also play audio from windows sources at the same time (browser, music apps etc).
