babyface RME

I am looking at this as an interface- the guy at sweetwater said this is about the best converters in a unit under 800$.  It is hard to go wrong with RME, the I/O is basic but will work for me starting from very little in the way of projects to semi-professional quality work.  anyway what is the opinions of all the smart people here?

I have an RME UCX and I love it. I wanted an interface with the best converters available without breaking the bank. Get the Babyface.......

Beware of the headroom on the Babyface. I had one and sold it. +4dBvu comes into it at -14 dbfs if I remember correctly. Could even be -12 dbfs. Transients may give you clipping problems if your not careful. It sounded okay and I thought it was great until I gained more experience and then took the plunge into a Lynx card. There are better converters/interfaces close to that price. It might be worth saving for something better. Peace...

The Babyface is also automatic input. If your signal is too low or something like that it has gain to use but it is better to have pre-amps and all of that on any audio interface to use. The TotalMixFX is for routing of the output signal at which it excels over others, but the FX (reverb or echo) can only be added to the output signal (listening) or loopbacked to use to make another track with the FX on it. Big manual you may not understand at first but stick with it, explains everything, but the inputs you do not adjust, when you adjust TotalMixFX and that computer program you are adjusting your output to listen to.

I've been a long-time user of the M-Audio Delta 2496 (a PCI card). Are I correct in assuming that the RME Babyface, although a USB connection, will deliver better sound, better stability and lower latency than the Delta 2496? I'm a little wary of changing from an internal card to a USB interface, but perhaps I'm thinking of the early days of USB version 1, when the USB interface didn't have sufficient bandwidth.

  Thanks, Jim. I'm putting it on my upgrade list. I see it's time to update my signature.

Firewire400 is 400megabytes/second (I think that is the unit), while USB2.0 is 480megabytes/second. Sorry to say that a PCI -based anything is around 33megabytes/second. The RME UFX (bigger brother to the UCX) runs 60 channels with USB2.0 interface and the interface is ASIO so there is no latency to worry about. But I do not use computer synths to audio files either, but I probably think other people have with the UFX they have. The Babyface works fine for me for that is all I need. In fact it is in my signature being used (probably not the best yet by me or anyone else though).

And making the Doors kind of cover song that is sorta into a video with the codecs I have means 44100kHz - 16bit (lossless) but it was only recorded at 48kHz-24bit and I found out that 96kHz-24bit is better maybe a lot better. (RME Babyface recording) I am using cheap Presonus Studio Channels also, and a TCHelicon voiceworks (that I really did not use that great until watching a video about it later on utube.

Point of clarifcation in what Beagle and spacealf are saying in regards to bus speeds:  be sure to use the right units when comparing the bus speeds because there is a difference between Mb/s (Mbits per second) and MB/s (MBbytes per second).  A Byte is 8 bits.  Additionally, some buses are half-duplex (can only exclusively transmit or exclusively receive at any given instant) while others are full-duplex (can simultaneously transmit and receive).
 
The shows the bus signaling data rates that I collected from wikipedia.  Real-world data throughput on these buses will actually be lower than each of these indicated speeds, but it should give a general comparison of the data carrying capability of each type of bus:
 
BUS type, Bit Rate (Mbit/s), Byte Rate (Mbyte/s), Duplex type, Transmission Style
USB 1.0, 12, 1.5, Half, Serial
USB 1.1, 12, 1.5, Half, Serial
USB 2.0, 480, 60, Half, Serial
USB 3.0, 5000, 625, Full, Serial
 
Firewire S100, 100, 12.5, Half, Serial
Firewire S200, 200, 25, Half, Serial
Firewire S400, 400, 50, Half, Serial
Firewire S800, 800, 100, Full, Serial
Firewire S1600, 1600, 200, Full, Serial
Firewire S3200, 3200, 400, Full, Serial
 
PCI/32bit/33MHz, 1064, 133, Half, Parallel
PCI/64bit/33MHz, 2128, 266, Half, Parallel
PCI/32bit/66MHz, 2128, 266, Half, Parallel
PCI/64bit/66MHz, 4264, 533, Half, Parallel
 
PCIe v1 per lane, 2000, 250, Full, Serial
PCIe v2 per lane, 4000, 500, Full, Serial
PCIe v3 per lane, 8000, 1000, Full, Serial
PCIe v4 per lane, 16000, 2000, Full, Serial  

What is "per lane" on PCI-e, for audio is only 1X factor while video cards use the entire slot and are up to 4X speed - audio as far as I have seen only uses a small portion of the entire PCI-e slot? (and there never seems to be more than one PCI-e slot in a computer, just can't do it). And Firewire if you could find any unit that goes over 800 might be something but no one is building those yet, and USB3.0 is verily out of the gate so far and I have not seen anything yet for USB3.0 either??? If you can not buy it, you can not use it, is what that means. (??) And in the end speed is not all that important in audio, perhaps in video or video and audio but just audio - more speed may not be needed. 128 bit computers in the future?? 3D TV is not all that great either they say, makes your eyeballs go weird or something like that.

yeah, latency is not really determined by usb 1.1, 2, 3 etc. Data thruput would matter in terms of simultaneous tracks in and out, so USB1.1 wouldn't be able to cope with more than 4in/4out, for example. However, PCI or PCIe will be slightly faster in general due to having direct access to the CPU, whereas FW and USB need to go thru a secondary controller. In former days, FW would be faster assuming a good chip (TI) was used,however recently RME,MOTU and M-Audio seem to have manage to bypass the USB controller issue somewhat. more important for latency is well written drivers and the presence of any hidden safety buffers (added to prevent digital conversion problems), and in these areas RME are top dogs.

getting the bigger picture now.....
just as i thought.