Home studio in action or what are audio interfaces, remotes, etc.

Lexicon IONIX U82S USB Desktop Recording Studio

This is a mid-price device in a 2U 19-inch format, a desktop model that surprises with its classic silver design. Eight analog inputs and 8 Amphenol XLR outputs are mirrored to each knob, which has individual eight-segment level meters for each channel. A complete set of software is included.

BEHRINGER U-PHORIA UMC202HD

• Location: external
• Sound card format: 2.0
• Connection interface: USB Type-A
• ASIO support: v2.0
• DAC bit size: 24 bit
• Maximum sampling rate: 192 kHz
• Signal to noise ratio: 110 dB
• Microphone phantom power: yes
• Connectors: 2*jack 6.35 mm, 1*mini-jack 3.5 mm, 2*XLR, 1*RCA

We are moving to a more expensive segment. Next up is U-PHORIA UMC202HD from the German brand BEHRINGER. We will again talk about an external desktop card that connects to a PC via a USB interface. The model is primarily designed for recording and processing sound, and it copes well with these tasks.

The audio interface has two XLR microphone connectors, which can be combined with standard TRS jacks. The device itself has rotary controls that adjust the sensitivity of the microphone, as well as switches for operating modes from linear to Hi-Z and vice versa.

To connect headphones, there is a 6.35 mm jack with a volume control mechanism and a switch that activates direct monitoring to eliminate latency, which is necessary when recording vocals or instruments. Nearby there is also a volume control and indicator lights for power and microphone phantom power activation status. The rear surface accommodates paired RCA connectors - Left and Right. There is also a USB Type-B port for the main connection and a switch for turning on phantom power.

Built-in amplifiers from MIDAS are clearly not considered the most top-end solution, but for professional work it is better to choose a more expensive device, and this model will completely satisfy beginners.

MOTU UltraLite-mk3 Hybrid Audio Interface

The second model from Motu is a compact half-rack in 1U Ultralite format, now presented in the third version of the device. Like the 828, the model is a hybrid and also has USB or Firewire connectivity. This device has a great advantage - it can be connected via the Firewire bus and use power for operation, which will also be transmitted via the Firewire bus, i.e. all over one wire. The device uses the same direct digital synthesis with phase-locked loop and internal synchronization mechanism as the 828, can be used in combination with other Ultralites and comes complete with complete software for any audio work. Built-in DSP effects include strong, classic reverb with two different compression types and a 7-band parametric EQ, all of which have multiple presets and parameters that will work with a computer connected to the unit or on its own in standalone mode. Next to the gold-plated TRS connector, there are two Amphenol jacks - a combo jack for guitar and microphone with phantom power.

Main characteristics influencing the choice of sound card for the studio

Often, the cost of the card becomes a decisive factor when choosing an audio interface: the musician has a certain budget that he must meet. At the same time, the final choice should be influenced not only and not so much by money - there are a number of more important characteristics that you need to look at before purchasing.

Connection type

The speed of data transfer from the interface to the computer and back, latency indicators and the throughput of the recording studio depend on it. Today on the market you can find interfaces with USB, Thunderbolt and FireWire ports.

When choosing sound cards for a home studio, the type of connection should be the last thing you look at: USB is everywhere now, Thunderbolt has begun to appear much more often. Yes, there is a difference between ports, but in most daily work scenarios you are unlikely to notice it. Therefore, choose here in the simplest way - based on the availability of a suitable connector on your computer or laptop.

Number of inputs and outputs

The main task of the interface is to connect instruments and output sound. More connectors mean more connection options, which means more flexibility of the sound card. Today, manufacturers offer sound cards for home studios with any combinations and bundles of ports; the final cost of the interface will depend on their number.

When choosing a model, you need to decide in advance how many and what instruments will be connected to the card. If you will record only yourself and one instrument (for example, a guitar), take a card with two inputs. There are plans to record acoustic drums - look towards devices with a large number of inputs. The situation with outputs is similar: focus on the complexity of the monitoring system.

If you miscalculate, you’ll have to get out of it, change the interface or expand the number of channels. The latter is not available to all cards, since the special ADAT connector is not found as often as we would like.

Additional ports and connectors

A factor that is a continuation of the previous one. If you have synthesizers and drum machines with a MIDI port, first consider sound cards with separate MIDI inputs and outputs. If you are planning an expansion, look for models with ADAT. If you want to reamp your guitar directly through the card, check out models with a separate connector for this.

Supported sample rate and bit depth

Regardless of the seriousness of the intentions, the audio card must record audio with the highest possible bit depth and sampling frequency. Of course, the average listener will never be able to tell the difference between 96 kHz audio and 44.1 kHz audio, but it all comes down to the end goals.

If you write music for films and do serious studio work, take models with higher performance. If you are going to post your imperishables only on YouTube, models with support for at least 48 kHz and 24-bit will suffice. If you plan to record demos, the bit depth and sampling numbers are not important at all.

Software and DSP

Some home studio sound cards are equipped with their own DSP processor and effects unit. With its help, you can remove the load from the computer processor and process audio before it is written to disk. DSP effects often sound better than conventional plugins, but choosing sound cards for a home recording studio based solely on its availability is not entirely wise.

The same goes for drivers. Before choosing, pay attention to the supported operating systems and the driver through which the card operates. Some models come with self-written drivers created by manufacturers specifically for the device, others work through a regular native USB driver. Stability of work depends only on the direct hands of the developers.

Mackie Onyx Blackjack

Robust, designed for use in all conditions. Uses Cirrus Logic processor-based conversions. It is possible to use condenser microphones with 48V phantom power. The box contains a set of software for working with sound at the level of professional software.

Home studio in action or what are audio interfaces, remotes, etc.

Listening to music beautifully recorded in world-class recording studios is wonderful, especially if your audio system has high fidelity (High Fidelity), but what if, in addition to the craving for listening, there is a bright and creative beginning. It is no secret that many people themselves play a variety of musical instruments, from an acoustic guitar or button accordion to a piano, trumpet or violin. Some people repeat other people's works, while others write their own. There is a layer of amateur musicians who write electronic music without using musical instruments at all, only with the help of a computer and mathematics implemented in editing programs. I wrote extremely minimalistic compositions based on the means of expression used for the DiHalt computer art festival, where I won 1st place with a work in which the sound of several instruments, including drums, was emulated using one synthesized curve, and all this took up 4-6 kb of space.

But this is the simplest case when you don’t need any third-party tools other than a computer to create music. But if you compose your songs with guitar accompaniment, vocals, and so on, then the question arises of how to record it all well, preferably at home. Here we come to the question of creating an amateur home recording studio. This question arose for me because of the desire to record some songs in a high-quality manner, since the matter never went beyond bad rehearsal recordings on which everything was quite hard to hear.

My task was to implement high-quality guitar recording, electric or acoustic, and high-quality vocal recording. The remaining instruments (drums, keyboards, trumpet, etc.) could be played in editing programs using various VST instruments.

Those. The main priority is high-quality recording of vocals and guitars. A microphone is required to record vocals. Well, what kind of problems are there? Buy a microphone and that’s it. But if you haven’t been in the know for a very long time, like me, then it’s difficult to understand what you need. There are two most common types of microphones:

1. Dynamic 2. Condenser

When choosing a microphone for home recording, price is an important factor. If you are not limited in finances, then spend 1000 or more euros on a microphone and get good sound. Otherwise, the challenge is to get an acceptable result for a small investment. A dynamic microphone is significantly cheaper. Let's consider its advantages: 1. Relatively low price, a fairly good microphone can already be bought from 2,000 rubles, although there are dynamic microphones for 10,000 rubles and more. 2. High overload capacity of the microphone - if you have loud energetic vocals, or groove (roar), then it is better to record with a dynamic microphone. 3. Undemanding to equipment. This means that a dynamic microphone does not require any special conditions for connection; you can even plug it into the microphone input of a computer sound card and easily make a recording. 4. There are no very strict requirements for muffling all extraneous sounds. As you can see there are quite a lot of advantages.

What are the disadvantages of a dynamic microphone? The only negative in my opinion is the lower music resolution. Dynamic microphones sound great and natural (depending on the model), but you won’t hear such audiophile “things” like some subtle throat nuances and the like that you are used to hearing in the best jazz vocal compositions. But accordingly, there are no such stringent requirements for silence in the room and, accordingly, total acoustic treatment of the room, since the microphone hears only a little in the immediate vicinity of itself. This is a plus of the above minus. But is there any difference at all in the sound of microphones, and do they sound at all - after all, their task is simply to record sound? You know, microphones greatly influence the sound, they don’t “fix” it, they actually “change” it. Surely you have come across recordings with a large number of sibilants or a digital flavor of the voice - you won’t believe it - this sound is not caused by a transistor amplifier, but by the model of the vocal microphone used during recording! You can listen to how this or that microphone sounds on the German website www.thomann.de, for example, the link https://www.thomann.de/gb/behringer_xm8500_bundle.htm demonstrates the sound of the Behringer XM8500 dynamic microphone costing only 33 euros. I listened to many microphones available on the site and the Behringer XM8500 seemed to me to be quite good in terms of price/sound ratio and availability in Russian stores, where the price is set at 2000 rubles.

The most popular dynamic microphone among amateurs is the Shure SM 58 model worth 109 euros, listen: https://www.thomann.de/gb/shure_sm58.htm?ref=search_rslt_shure+sm+58_105767_0 It has a higher musical resolution than the Behringer XM8500, but the feeling of “digitality” is also brighter.

The second category is condenser microphones.

Advantages of condenser microphones:

1. High musical (audiophile) resolution.

Those. If you need an audiophile recording with characteristic audiophile “tricks”, then this is only a condenser microphone. This microphone has a lot of disadvantages, but all of them are of a financial nature, from the point of view of sound, but there are only advantages. So, the disadvantages of a condenser microphone:

1. To connect, you need special (not cheap) equipment with +48v phantom power. 2. Due to its wide directivity and high musical resolution, the microphone hears everything, even what you yourself cannot hear, so to use it it is desirable/required to acoustically treat the room to suppress extraneous sounds and reflections. 3. The microphone may need a pop filter (a membrane made of fabric that absorbs noise, noise, etc.). A pop filter may already be built into the microphone. 4. A condenser microphone is significantly more expensive, 2 times or more. But remember that almost all jazz bands record with condenser microphones.

What is the difference between a cheap microphone for 100 euros and an expensive microphone for 1000 euros? Firstly, you can listen to the difference yourself on the website www.thomann.de by selecting the microphone models you are interested in, but since I started this topic, I will say that the difference between a cheap microphone and an expensive one lies primarily in the emerging caressing sweetness of the sound, as well as in the more ideal elaboration of nuances, lack of “digitality”, more “analogue”. For the home, of course, you usually choose something cheaper than 1000 euros. Among the inexpensive ones, I was interested in the sound of the Audio-Technica AT2010 condenser microphone (109 euros) due to its frequency of 40-20,000 Hz.

Another nuance - the microphone can be vocal (for recording vocals), instrumental (for recording guitars, etc.). Accordingly, this is determined precisely by the frequency coverage of the microphone. At 40-20 kHz you can record both vocals and instruments, i.e. This is a vocal-instrumental microphone. But due to its unavailability, I looked at a slightly simpler alternative, the Audio-Technica MB4K Midnight Blues microphone (€104).

This is the highest model in the budget line, and if the line itself is dynamic, then the MB4K is a condenser microphone, which has its own special name - “Midnight Blues”, and is designed to show that with this model, even in a low budget, luxurious sound of high musical resolution has appeared. Microphone frequency from 80 Hz to 20,000 Hz. You can also perfectly record both guitar and vocals on it. Listen to Audio-Technica MB4K Midnight Blues (104 euros): https://www.thomann.de/gb/audio_technica_mb_4k.htm?ref=search_rslt_Audio-Technica+MB4K_175137_1 Okay, we chose a microphone, especially a condenser one, but how to connect it? Here I was faced with the problem of where to get phantom power for the microphone. On the one hand, everything seems simple - a cheap mixing console will allow you to connect both a microphone and a guitar at the same time. But it's not that simple. The cheapest mixing consoles from Alto, Behringer, etc., firstly, do not have phantom power, and secondly, they make noise on their own.

Thirdly, even if we choose a mixing console model with phantom power, and this costs from 9-10,000 rubles per console, the sound quality of the same microphone will depend on the operational amplifiers of the console, which are poor in cheap consoles. In total, with the remote control, we lengthen the signal recording path, introduce noise from the remote control into the recording, and drop the sound quality of the microphone to the level of the quality of the op-amp remote control. At this stage, the proposal seemed more sane to me - the Yamaha MG06 mixing console, which, according to reviews, is not noisy and has good op-amps.

But in the end, you still ended up with a lot of wires - you pull the guitar and microphone cord into the console, then from the console you pull the analog signal into... At this point, I planned to use a computer sound card [email protected] But you must agree - everything is very long and cumbersome. If you are rehearsing somewhere at the “base”, then a mixing console is great, but for recording alone, when each instrument is recorded separately, you can come up with something better in terms of final quality on a minimal budget.

Therefore, the idea of ​​a remote control was given a reversal at the last moment. Let me remind you that even if you bought a remote control for 10,000 rubles, the wires to it will cost you at least half of its cost. I forgot to add that microphones usually don’t come with wires; again, you buy them separately and it’s not cheap, as owners of Hi-Fi systems know (that wires are not cheap). In total, my research came to the conclusion that the remote control is not the best solution and I turned my attention to audio interfaces. You may not have heard this term, but it is developed among musicians. An audio interface is something similar to an external sound card, but has its own characteristics. The audio interface is designed for direct recording of your musical creations - it has inputs for guitar (electric and bass) and a microphone, contains an ADC digitizer (high or low level depends on the price of the audio interface) and even a DAC for listening.

There are many audio interfaces - for example focusrite scarlett 2i4, RME Fireface, MOTU, Roland, etc. The logic is that having an audio interface, you immediately connect instruments or a microphone to it, and then by connecting the audio interface to the computer in a recording-mastering program you are familiar with (Cubase, Fl Studio, Ableton, etc.), you record by digitizing the sound using the audio interface.

But the main feature of the audio interface is hardware support for ASIO and therefore fantastically low latency. Let me explain, you decided to simply connect a guitar or microphone to your computer’s sound card. They ran it along the strings, and the sound appeared in the speakers only after a considerable time. This is because sound cards have a very high latency. And even if the card supports ASIO, you can still expect a latency of 25-40 ms at best. Audio interfaces have much better values. For example, the Roland UA-55 audio interface has an input delay of 1 ms and an output delay of 2.5 ms.

In FL Studio, you work with a latency of 6 ms - in other words, you play in real time, but during these 6 milliseconds, the effects you need are applied to the sound - compressor, reverb or heavy metal / guitar solo effects (for example via VST Guitar Rig) etc.

Which audio interface to choose is up to you to research; I chose the Roland UA-55 from the inexpensive ones. It has phantom power, a good preamp for the microphone and receives power directly via USB 2.0 (minimal wires), and most importantly, it has a magic autosense button. If you've actually played in a rock band (like me), then you know that when you connect all the instruments, there will be hum from the wires. When you stop touching the strings on the guitar, the background starts and so on.

And this is not a consequence of the fact that I am crooked, lopsided, etc., listen to Eric Clapton's Unplugged album and you will clearly hear what I am talking about. And this is a world-class musician and the equipment there does not cost 100 euros. To avoid this, you need to set the sensitivity level. If the device knows what sensitivity is needed, then there will be no self-excitation. The Roland UA-55 detects this automatically. Those. you connect, turn on the same thrash metal/rock/solo effects in Guitar Rig and hear the background - press the Auto-Sens button and immediately there is complete silence and perfect sound. In principle, a similar effect can be achieved in the Guitar Rig itself or any other audio interface or remote control by turning the Gain knob, but this takes a long time.

In terms of the quality of the recording on the Roland UA-55, I hear that the sound on the recording sounds slightly simpler than it sounded at the time of performance, but overall the recording turns out great - clean, without any interference, noise or background, in high musical resolution , for me this quality even exceeds the desires/requirements that I had for the recording. In total, to record quite well at home, all you need is an audio interface and a microphone. I saw on YouTube that there are quite a lot of studios using the Roland UA-55 for recording, and musicians and vocalists were happy with the result, as was I. If you have asked yourself similar questions in your desire to record your music, then I hope this review will help you. Don’t be indignant loudly, if you thought that some statements are controversial, I’m not a professional, but an amateur who wanted to record at home and achieved his goal with the experience described - make corrections in the comments, it will be useful for everyone to know. The impressions regarding the most used equipment are below:

Condenser microphone (cardioid) Audio-Technica MB4K Midnight Blues.

I really liked it. You can hear everything amazingly, the finest nuances, beautiful tones in the voice, wheezing, etc. - luxurious audiophile sound. There was no need for a pop filter with this microphone and my voice. It’s very easy to sing because the microphone hears everything, even what you can’t hear yourself, so the most exquisite vocal pirouettes can be achieved easily. You can sing normally or very quietly, nothing will be missed.

I also tried to write with it in an acoustically treated and untreated room - in both cases I liked the result. The voice sounds natural on this microphone, but with a lot of tasty audiophile “tricks”. I won't say this is the best or not the best microphone, I haven't listened to others, but its sound is impressive and has high musical resolution. With such a microphone, even a voiceless person can sing.

Audio interface Roland UA-55 . This is also my first audio interface. First of all, I liked the ease of use and ease of use. He performs his task with dignity. You need to connect an electric guitar or bass or a microphone - just plug it into the Roland. An important nuance - you can record either a guitar or a microphone, because for a guitar you need to switch the impedance to Hi-Z, and for a condenser microphone you need to turn on the +48v phantom power, and the inputs are common, so you either supply phantom power or change the resistance.

If there are any tricks on how to use both, then I don’t know them. Theoretically, this would be convenient, but in practice it is better to write vocals and guitar separately, paying more attention to the technique of a particular “instrument,” no matter the voice or the guitar. There are many other audio interfaces on the market, perhaps there are better ones at this price, but I have no complaints about the Roland UA-55 - I got what I wanted, easily and simply.

Wires. Yes, I had to choose the wires and their length. After much thought, I took all 3 meter ones, fearing that this would kill the resolution or give background. But you need to remember that in this case you are the primary source, the original, and in order to kill such quality initially (a zero copy, similar to VHS) you have to try very hard. Therefore, the cables (made in Italy) performed excellently, silently, with high resolution.

Do you have any other questions on the topic? Write in the comments, but I, as a lover of high-fidelity sound, have only one left: is it possible to use the audio interface as an audiophile-level DAC? If you're interested, we'll talk about it next time.

Steinberg UR22C

The main competitor of Scarlett 2i2. The card is equipped with fast USB 3.0, MIDI input and output and a built-in DSP effects processor - you can take the load off your computer. The audio interface works not only with macOS or Windows, but also with all tablets and smartphones on iOS - you can record with the same high quality on both desktop and portable devices.

Separately, it is worth noting the recording quality - the card writes cleanly, clearly and richly thanks to the D-PRE preamplifiers. In terms of price-quality ratio, it is one of the best options on the market.

What makes it special: DSP processor and excellent recording quality Cost: from 11,500 ₽

Interface: USB 3.0 (Type-C) Inputs/outputs: 2/2 MIDI ports: yes Recording: 192 kHz/32-bit