Best Audio Interface for Macbook Pro

well. . . if you are willing to spend the money, and wish to keep your firewire bus open. . . then this might be an option for you.

http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/symphonymobile.php

It is made by Apogee (obviously) and apogee stuff is of the utmost in high quality. don't worry, i'm not a one company user. This is a brand new system and seems to be the most easily integrated with Apple hardware. Apogee basically makes native interfaces only for Logic - however they can be used on other DAWs. . .

This might be the solution to your quandry.

It's fun to jump on people, because most of the time they usually get mad, as opposed to look at what's in question.

That's a pretty harsh comment to all the people who
A. Don't have access to a lot of stuff based on where they live
B. Don't have time to go through a Pepsi challenge and just want to get stuff done
C. Found something they like and didn't look back, but made progress.

Shouldn't rule out people solely based on your preference of response.

I personally think Logic needs to update as a lot of stuff has somewhat caught up and passed. Doesn't matter anyway you seem like a solid Logic user.

Since I can't suggest I hope you wasted time reading through this post, because I don't fit the criteria of posting in this thread.

See ya

Great Larry, very mature response.

At least post your preference. If your gonna take the friggin time to post on here, let people know what you have to say. Pretty schoolyard response if you ask me.

Not like he's gonna know whether or not its the only gear you use. It'll answer his question and give him a chance to look at a few different pieces of gear. Now, there are responses on here from two separate posters - yet one piece of gear suggested.

If you had just been gracious to give your suggestion, he would have had something to compare my Apogee response to. Once again - mature response - "You don't like me, so I'm just not gonna help you! WAH!"

Ok

No doubt, Logical. Larry, you seem to have a fairly large sized chip lodged firmly and permanently up a certain orifice you sit upon.

See ya.

Mike, Logical's adivce looks like a great choice.

Good luck, but most of all...have fun!

The Apogee Symphony Mobile is the only Express/34 audio card I'm aware of, but isn't available yet. Regular PCMCIA cards don't fit into the Macbook Pro. As for Firewire, AKAIK, the RME Fireface's have the best drivers and correctly report latency.

your question is easy to get lots of responses, but difficult to come up with any truths... mainly because much of this question is very very qualitatively different for different people.

where to start with some of the questions...

do you need low latency - do multi-track recordings, or simply audio down in independent takes?

how many channels do you need to record at any 1 time?



here are some of the items that i have been looking at, personally...

Grace Design Lunatec V3 - with toslink optical digital option.
http://www.gracedesign.com/products/V3/lunatecV3.htm
can be battery powered. great preamps and A/D converter. no integrated monitoring option. only does 2 channels. the MBP has an optical digital input, so the optional optical output model could be hooked up directly to the MBP without any intermediate interface

Apogee Mini-Me USB option
http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/miniseries.php
can be battery powered. great preamps and A/D converter. integrated monitoring option. only does 2 channels and up to 48KHz sampling rate. built in compression / limiting can be useful to some, but not others.

Apogee also has the firewire option card coming up and the reason that I suggested the Mini-Me with USB option vs. FW, is that you could also get a Mini-DAC equipped with FW and then when you need to, can plug the digital output of the Mini-Me into the Mini-DAC and use the FW interface (with up to 96k up / 192k down) to the computer... so would basically have the choice of USB or FW with this combo.

obviously the above options are very limited and hardly qualify as "interfaces" in the traditional sense, unless you have very minimal I/O requirements, but my application requires only 2 channels and battery power for me is a must.

my idea of portable might also be different than yours. that expresscard solution looks good if you can afford it.

EVERYONE needs low latency!! haha. . . : )

until you find an EXPRESSCARD solution, the Apogee Mini-DAC might actually be a suitable option. you could hook up the digital optical output of the MBP direct into the the toslink input on the Mini-DAC. as a bonus, you could also have a firewire OR a USB option card on the DAC that would allow a traditional I/O capability (2ch in, 2ch out) if you ever needed it. despite being portable, the quality of the Mini DAC is actually quite good.

another similiar option would be the Grace Design m902 headphone amplifier
http://www.gracedesign.com/products/m902/m902.htm
it too has a USB connection, but optical would probably work better for you.

If all you need is a reasonable stereo output then what about using the optical output on the macbook. You just need some DA to convert the digital optical output. Zero load on your firewire, usb busses too.

Just a thought.

Any suggestions on those, Thomas? I'm in the market for something portable just so I don't get the board interference on the output of my MBP. Zero load on my firewire buss would be awesome!

I've no suggestions I'm afraid - its not something I've looked into properly. Of course anything would "work", so long as it has an optical input to connect the mac's o/p to. Being optical you can assured there will be no "interference" to worry about.

How about a second hand dat player from ebay?
or an A/V amplifier (as in those normally used for home cinema)

I found this after a very quick web search
http://tinyurl.com/2s6sqe