Macke Blackbird or Focusrite Saffire 40

[Sink]

Which of these budget interfaces do you think is better? The Saffire has a midi in/out, which is very useful since I think firewire has less jitter than the more common USB midi interfaces. Besides that I don't see much difference.

The sound quality of the units is really up to a debate. I recon they are mostly indistinguishable, although the mackie has more transparent converters and the pres are also different. I would absolutely appreciate if an owner here could run his saffire or blackbird through RightMark or equivalent to see how it fares as far as transparency is concerned. Available here for free: http://audio.rightmark.org/download.shtml

 

[Studdy]

I will say what i always say. The number one thing to look for in an interface is STABILITY. After that with modern mid priced interfaces you are splitting hairs. Who cares if one has a slightly warmer or brighter preamp if the unit is unstable and driving you nuts. Cheers

 

[Sink]

I will say what i always say. The number one thing to look for in an interface is STABILITY. After that with modern mid priced interfaces you are splitting hairs. Who cares if one has a slightly warmer or brighter preamp if the unit is unstable and driving you nuts. Cheers

The interfaces use the same TC applied dice drivers. Yes, this is a splitting of the hair type of thread. I was actually able to find a rightmark result for saffire, but if someone could run their onyx through the analysis, it would be wonderful.

The blackbird price was just hiked by 50 bucks, while saffire prices keep declining (in europe). In terms of value they are very close now, maybe slight edge to saffire.

 

[Trevoire520]

As far as sound quality goes there'll be next to nothing between them. I did a preamp test a while back that included a Mackie Onyx 800R and a Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 (amongst others) and found the Focusrite to be a little bir darker than the Mackie. But both were perfectly useable.