Hi people, I.m thinking of buying a AUDIO INTERFACE to use with MTS , I'm only looking at 2 TO 4 INPUTS and an inexpensive
one at that. I've been looking at Tascam, Berhinger etc. Any suggestions??? Thank you in advance ...
I've used various Focusrite's, Audiobox USB, Alesis io2 Express, Akai EIE, and likely some others. All worked reasonably well for basic inexpensive "budget" interface. I preferred the Focusrite out of them (that doesn't mean the others were bad, just the one I preferred), and have been using a Scarlett 8i6 since early 2014. The Scarlett 2i2 was a fairly decent one for cheap, have used those as well if you just need two MIC / instrument input, not sure what their current offerings are though. I stuck with the 8i6 as it runs with Scarlett MixControl, which gave me a feature I needed, has MIDI in / out, plus an extra line input on the rear; has worked well through the years now.
I'd say look at various offerings, check out the features of each unit and make sure it does what you need, compare, and watch some Youtube videos on various brands models to get an idea how they work.
My first audio interface was a Presonus Firestudio. It wasn't the greatest one out there, but it did have eight channels. The biggest problem was that it would desync all the time.
From there I moved to a Focusrite Scarlett interface. It was pretty great but would bug out on occasion (audio would get all crackly and would need to be restarted).
Next, I got a Universal Audio Apollo Twin. It sounds fantastic and came with some awesome plugins. By far it's the best one I've used so far.
My focusrite bugs out sometimes as well, it seems to be something with the windows driver in the first generation units. I found that when I just change the buffer size it works fine again. You don't need to restart everything. The second generation units apparently are fine.