New Audio interface, which one?

[jdnz]

Stable drivers (i use Cubase 7 on Windows 7 x64, if that matters)
Lowest latency possible for playing VSTI's.

steinberg UR44 - right price, 4 inputs with decent mic pres, extremely good latency and drivers and you know it'll play nice with cubase

Having said that you should be able to get your juli@ running a lot lower than 512 byte buffers - my old maya44 (which isn't in the same league at the juli@) was quite happy at with heaps of vstis at 256 on my old core2duo , though with ESIs hidden buffers that was still quite high actual latency - in the end I ditched it and went for a NI KA6 on my new pc (another good option - and out here in NZ cheaper than the ur22)

[james0tucson]

Based on specs and little else, I'm leaning toward the Focusrite 18i20 as the basis for my next system.
I believe I want to go with a beefy laptop, something along the lines of a Lenovo Thinkpad "Yoga".

I just noticed the M-Audio M-Track Eight which looks interesting but not as exciting as the Focusrite.
And there's a KVR banner ad right now all about the MOTU 8m which seems pretty interesting, but it's the first I've heard of "Thunderbolt" IO, and it's just USB2.0 which sounds like a design miss.

My budget is around $1600. Anyone here had their hands on any of this stuff? How about a reality check on this idea, one of these big USB interfaces with a higher-end Surface Pro? Does that work ok?

Thanks,

James

[ecc83]

Hi,
Been here before but not a lot! Come from Home Recording, Sound on Sound and The Fretboard, all worth a visit.

The interface! Lowest latency of any USB AI other than RME is the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6.

Two excellent mic/line/instru inputs, two more balanced line inputs (for that mixer!) S/PDIF and MIDI. 4 analogue outs.
Comes with Cubase lite and Kontakt player and about 3G of downloadable samples.
I have had one now for over a year and it works flawlessly with 2 W7/64 desktop, an HP i3 W7/64 laptop, a Toshibas Vista(!) laptop and a couple of old XP P4 jobbies.

Dave. (Northampton)