Is RME that good?

maximumpower
 
[...] as I am just a hobbyist [...]
 
[...] I have no complaints as far as sound quality goes on my current interface [...]

In some respects the law of diminishing returns applies, so those two pieces of the OP stuck out. It is akin to buying an expensive instrument if unable to play it properly... there is no reason not to learn on something adequate and move up later on (if desired). Just throwing "practicality" into the mix on you.
 
(I definitely cannot speak to RME, but I also had an M-Audio interface that fell into the "unsupported" category.)

I currently have a MOTU Ultralite MK3, I've had it for a few years and support was great when it stopped working, they replaced it out of warranty for a decent price.
 
I agree with Thomas about the new line of MOTU products.  I've not used an RME product, but for the money, I'd very likely stick with upgrading my MOTU to one of the new Ultralite AVB if I were in the market to upgrade to anything.
 
Jim Roseberry sings the praises of the AVB and he's tested it pretty extensively from my understanding.  it gets great low round trip latency and has a really good noise floor (-110dB, IIRC) and the mic pres are quite nice.

I have owned an older MOTU 828mkII, which had mediocre sound quality and sub-par preamps.  I traded it for a Steinberg MR816, which had better preamps and sound quality but awful drivers. I now use a UFX, which is just better in every way, sound wise, driver wise, durability wise,  etc.  The new MOTU interfaces use a Sabre DAC which has the best specs you will find in a chip converter,  however the build quality is cheap and plastic, made in China, as opposed to Germany for the RME.   
 
You get what you pay for.  If you care about build quality and reliability as well as sound quality, RME has them both, MOTU does not IMO, just about 4dB lower noise floor due to the chip.  
 
Neither can quite match Prism, Lavry, Mytek, Merging, etc in terms of sound quality, regardless of printed specs, but both make products suitable for professionals, and I have seen some great engineers use both.

I paid around 1100 for my RME UCX. Takes some shopping though. Check prices in Europe and go for a price match at your local dealer maybe?

As an aside, I would definitely try to buy a class compliant interface because of the awesomeness of Linux Ubuntu studio.

I have definitely taken my UCX out in my backpack with my Linux hard drive and a couple of Mics and made recordings at friends houses. So amazingly convenient.

Jim will probably back me up on this. Something you have all missed. Latency. RME is way ahead in that department. Amazing round trip latency figues. Better (by a long shot) than anything I have had previously. For some that is a very important factor.  They sound sweet too.  And TotalMix is excellent.

If paying 300% higher price for a <10% better product/sound fits your "production plan", go ahead.
Well, of course this is caught from the wind, but that's how I've figured it out. After a certain
decent price range (200-400 € ??) you must pay a lot for every, hardly audible, hardly noticeable
improvement.
But I guess sometimes it feels sane to pay for the high quality of build alone, when you're fed up with plugs and sockets that can't bear the weight of the cable. Propably it also gives you more confidence, and a good feel, to know you're using high quality gear.

When I considered the cost, I factored in how much I hate to have to tell the band a song was lost due to a glitch.

The RME unit I have hard limits more than clips. It will auto set gain on four of 18 channels. Using the SPIDF to slave I can record 24 concurrent channels. In class complaint mode I can record using Linux which to me is a rock solid mobile recording platform.

Like other interfaces, it has zero latency internal routing. It has EQ and compressor on every channel, input and output.

It comes with DigiCheck which has a great spectral analyzer and other things.

If you connect the ADAT out to the ADAT in, you get all kinds of interesting parallel processing options.

When recording live, you don't need sonar. You can just use RME TotalMix and DigiCheck.

I have had both Motu and RME and now mainly use Focusrite.
 
RME - I had reliability issues and their after sales service was not good to say the least - luckily I had purchased the RME through Sweetwater and as per usual Sweetwater came to the rescue. But RME - rubbish service and in fact they never managed to get their product to work adequately (even after being poked by Sweetwater!), so it sits in the cupboard!!!
 
Motu - used a 828 very happily for many years - that went wrong eventually and the service from Motu was superb - still using the repaired / replaced 828 today - excellent.
 
But my main interfaces today are Focusrite Saffire Pros - very happy with these indeed.
Nigel
 
 

hmm... so I am certainly not on the level of some of the pros here so feel free to totally dismiss this BUT...
 
Considering you are doing this as a hobbyist or even semi pro... wouldn't it maybe be better to invest those massive markup dollars on other input devices that will improve sound quality such as mics, guitars, sweet preamps, mixers or even instruments (like better guitars/amps/etc)?
 
I'm kind of thinking there is a tipping point where a studio may own all the best mics and external gear that the sound going in is at max potential (like 20-30 grand worth of mics and pres and whatever) so then it comes down to how do we get the wicked sound being outputted from that wicked gear INTO the box better. Then paying 3 times as much for an interface might become a priority.
 
BUT on the other end of the spectrum if you don't own that super high end stuff OUTSIDE of the box is it really worth spending that kind of money on something that is merely a vehicle for getting the sound OUTSIDE to the INSIDE?
 
Seriously curious... but really to me I'd keep using my humble Focusrite box and instead dump the money into some mics and/or nice pres/and or some nice mastering software. $1000 can go a long way for a "prosumer" rig.
 
Seriously I do not know though and certainly don't want to contradict the heavy hitters who ahve posted here.
 
Cheers.

If you need low round trip latency for monitoring through a DAW then RME do the business. Their driver and firmware support and installation (different firmware depending whether you're using Mac or PC) to date is amongst the best, if not the best. It works fine off USB2, USB3, Firewire 400 and connected to Thunderbolt 2 via a firewire adaptor cable.

I've used my UFX for field recording at a friend's house armed with the UFX, a 32GB USB stick and an iPad to run RME's iOS version of totalmix. Very straightforward to do.

As for audio quality, the fact is that the mid-price interfaces from Roland, Focusrite, almost anyone, nowadays are all pretty good. Particular AD/DA chips are often used by several manufacturers in products in different price brackets. For example the UFX uses the same DA chip as a less expensive Presonus interface. The difference with the "higher end" tends to be in the drivers and the analogue components, power filtering etc. Also microphone pres and background noise levels come into it.

There's a law of diminishing returns with interfaces like there is with anything else, so once you get beyond a certain point you have to spend quite a bit more to get increasingly less noticable improvement in audio quality. Quite where that point is is debatable of course. I wouldn't get too hung up over 3dB difference in dynamic range though, at least not when you're looking at ranges of over 110-115dB. In the real world that's not very relevant.

If it helps the RME mic pres are quieter than my Focusrite octopre pres, and I think they sound a little fuller, but it's not the kind of difference that makes you sit up and take notice.

I went with RME primarily for the number of inputs and the very low latency drivers. I also considered MOTU but at the time RME struck me as the better option for me. It helped that RME were quick at answering a couple of questions I had and at the time there were some doubts about MOTU's USB performance compared to firewire and I didn't want to have to mess around with firewire on a Windows 8+ PC.

I have a MOTU microlite MIDI interface that works so well I can forget it even exists, which is more than I can say for M-Audio :-/

Both RME and MOTU are reputable, well established and highly regarded and in the music/audio business that says something. In car terms deciding between them (and Apogee if you're Mac only) is a bit like deciding between buying a new Ford Mustang and a Jaguar. The basics are solid in both so it comes down to the little differences and what matters to one person might not matter so much to another.

Again I need to mention the Tascam UH-7000.  High latency but if you want sound quality, you got it.  Conversion is excellent and the preamps are simply stellar.  For $400 you get high-end sound quality.  Excellent stereo unit.  latency on my system is 11 ms, but it has digital in/out so you can use it in conjunction w/ other interfaces.
 
@

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There isn't much to be gained with the PCI slot cards outside of using digital interface cards to connect a wide variety of converters and benefiting from RME's fantastic interface.  Latency can be decreased slightly, but most companies have abandoned the PCI slot conversion cards because of inferior power supply quality on computer motherboards which can add an incredible amount of noise including oscillator "whining" to AD/DA conversion.  The protocol on RME's older cards that connected to the MultiFace was to avoid the onboard firewire port on a computer which were likely unstable and insufficient for audio use, especially if using a non-TI chipset.  RME's modern firewire and USB drivers can run reliably on inferior devices and chipsets.