Buyers Guide: Audio Interfaces over $1000

Quality costs. And if you’ve decided to spend over USD$1000 on an audio interface, you’ve decided that when it comes to music you’re serious about quality. By making this decision, you have left a lot of compromises behind: just about any audio interface over $1000 will be at least 24bit/96KHz, have a generous number of inputs, and have good quality audio to digital converters. And there are very few USB interfaces over $1000 – almost all have low-latency Firewire or PCI interfaces.

But budget will still be a consideration. $1000 is just the starting point, and the prices go up quite a long way from there. What are you hoping to gain in return for all of that money? Lots of inputs? High quality and better reliability? Additional features? Some combination of these?

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