(Last Updated On: July 16, 2023)
Does A High Quality Audio Interface Make Sound Better?
A lot of people ask this question Does A High Quality Audio Interface Make Sound Better? When it comes to buying an audio interface, some people have this confusion whether it affects your sound quality or not? Well, we did some research and luckily, found the answer. Continue reading and come to know if buying an audio interface is worth it or not and will it make your music sound better?
Whether something sounds better or not, it is an extremely subjective topic since the answer to it entirely depends on somebody’s listening abilities.
Audio interfaces are designed for providing the listeners with a flat sound. Which means they aim to provide as accurate reproduction of sound in a digital to analog conversion as possible, however they employ pure objective physics to do it.
If the result sounds better or not, every listener has its own judgment regarding that. However, by using an audio interface, producer doesn’t want to try and make it sound better, instead he wants to make it sound accurate.
Non audio interface DACs (Digital-Analogue-Converters) tend to be less precise in delivering a physically accurate, analogue representation of the digitally stored signal, in favor of putting their own “spin” on how something sounds by introducing some changes to the signal for the purpose of making the sound more pleasing to certain people.
These are the converters used in personal headphone amplifiers or personal use (end-user) devices.
However, if we want to answer the question completely, we would say that low quality audio interfaces do not have good quality DAC chips and these chips do not even cover the very basic 200–8000 Hz range.
This results in a very dull and an inaccurate representation of the signal. So, once you go for a high-quality audio interface, you will see that it produces music on a more accurate representation of signals.
Few Key Points to keep in your mind:
- The differences created by an audio interface are subtle but they tend to stack up like when you’re recording a lot of real instruments: as an example, if the converter introduces an inaudible EQ hump @ 400Hz, it’d probably become somewhat prominent if you stack ten tracks with the same hump on top of each other.
- The digital to analog converters do not affect the files you have saved on your PC. They only affect the sound going out from your computer. Once you play your recordings from your computer speakers, the sound will be the same as you saved it to be.
- If you are monitoring your recording through a DAW, the latency shall be affected. With a guitar, even a few milliseconds can throw you off, but probably doesn’t have much impact on playing, say, a sweeping, slow-attack synth pad.
- Mic preamps (which most interfaces these days have) impart some kind of qualities to the sound. There’ll probably have more impact on the sound than the converters.
So, this should give you an understanding of how an audio interfaces affect the music and make them sound better.
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