So I just sold my midas f24 and am looking to pick up a new interface or mixer.
I was thinking of picking up a Motu 1248 and 24ai for 32 analog ins and going the separate route to not worry about compatibility and having a mixer not be supported or perform well. And AVB/usb/thunderbolt would mean not worrying about chaining interfaces or using aggregate devices.
But I was also looking for control surfaces for ableton with motorized faders and found the qu series supposedly can double for that and handle it well. although I have not seen how this works anywhere, I know ableton support is lacking on a lot of motorized fader controllers.
Looking further I could get a QU 32 for about the same price as the motu interfaces with just as many analog inputs, could mix on it or mix in ableton and use it as a control surface, and it has a class compliant interface so wouldn’t worry about driver support. Being digital with lots of features I could see maybe doing real mixes on it and not missing fancy digital EQs/compressors/etc.
I like being able to jam with all hardware, then recording and doing final mixing itb.
My concern is just how well the usb interface performs since I don’t want to run into issues again. I would like to just have one interface and not mess with aggregate devices. I use mostly hardware and would want to multitrack it, but I sometimes use ITB reverbs and master compression, so not sure if latency would be an issue. I would also like to be able to have the option to use some hardware reverbs for final mixing after multitracking.
Just how good is the built in USB interface and will it be enough? I would probably get a seperate monitor controller like SPL crimson or maybe try the behringer monitor2usb, which would give me headphone monitoring and I could switch to use the built in interface when I’m using the studio computer for other things without switching on the whole mixer.