Audio interface update:
MOTU M2 arrived today. Excellent build quality. Everything solid and tight. Backlit LCD screen is super easy to read, although missing numeric level indicators.
Sound quality is outstanding. Lowest-noise source ever to my KRK monitors, and HP and has plenty of juice to drive my Senn HD650s loudly and cleanly.
If you are looking for an external audio interface, just buy this. Trust me, I've tried lots of them. This is the way.
@voltronic I use an audioquest dragonfly red and some alesis srp100 headphones (budget but they sound amazing)
@soulasassin
I've heard good things about those Dragonfly units. For me, I need an external interface for recording with phantom-powered condensers, balanced outputs for my monitors, and a good headphone amp.
Previously, I had to switch between two output devices when checking mixes between monitors and headphones, because my Focusrite interface couldn't properly drive my headphones.
Now, I have one audio device that does it all, and I'm a happy camper.
@voltronic I picked the AQ because I literally only need it to drive a pair of speakers or headphones. The bulk of my collection is in 24bit flac so onboard audio was never going to cut it.
@soulasassin
Yeah that's what most of my music is also. I also do a lot of recording that tends to need EQ and /or a trip through iZotope RX Spectral Denoise, so I don't trust onboard audio for that either.
Not only that, but getting your analog audio I/O away from all the stuff going on inside a PC case is always a good idea.
@voltronic I'm just arsey about my music sounding good 🙂
@voltronic This irks me as well tbh, like they actually put effort into making it less user friendly on purpose.
@soulasassin
I skipped from 7 to 10, but I suspect this happened in 8 when they tried to make everything touch-friendly. It seems that translated to limiting options that could be easily accessed, but with 10 they supposedly were moving away from that.
With all the tinkering they've done with Win10, it's especially frustrating that they haven't addressed the Settings / Control Panel issue.
@voltronic bring back Windows XP!!!!
^ side note:
Win10 needs to get its act together and put *all* system settings in one place.
For example: you can't adjust I/O sample rate in Settings. You have to go through the old Control Panel. If you didn't know this, you'd be limited to 48 kHz (the default) whereas the M2 can do 192 kHz.
It's a similar situation with network adapter settings.
Please, MS: either kill the newer Settings and make us use Control Panel, or really fix this. New Windows users would have no clue.