Neve 88M

I don't normally write reviews, but this warrants it! I've been a UA Apollo user for 15 years and there's no doubt they sound great, have great features and UA's plugin arsenal is fantastic, but it is immediately apparent when you plug in the Neve 88M, that it is a jump up in quality. Much more analogue in quality - controlled subs, a rich midrange, wider stereo image and controlled/smoothed HF's + transient detail - and this is just the headphone output!!! I owned a pair of RND Shelford channels for quite a while, so it's quite easy to compare the differences to each other. To put it in a nutshell - the 88M sounds closer to the quality of the Shelfords on a sliding scale, than to the Apollos. This to me makes the 88M worth every penny and to be honest, it barely costs anymore than a Twin X gen 2, but you don't get all the bells and whistles like on an Apollo.

The mic pre's are amazing - they have that lovely smoothness of Neve pre's without being quite as coloured as 1073 types. And simply blow away every other interface if musicality is your goal. The DI as good as the famed RNDI, although slightly different - the RNDI being slightly glassier and mid present and the 88M being slightly thicker in the upper bass region. The ADC/DAC to my ears and monitoring sounds better than the Apollo's.

The icing on the cake is the loopback DAW input feature. This is the addition that made me buy an 88M. Basically all digital audio has that digitalness which you can only understand, hear and feel after you've tried really good analogue gear. Send anything from your DAW straight back into the 88M (via a split from 88M monitor outs, so you don't have to mess around with an I/O plugin like in Logic) and record it back in with a very few samples latency. And it makes everything sound fantastic - the amount of colour is just right, so you can put everything through it and it doesn't get too coloured. It's just got that great sound. Put a mix through it, instantly wider, fatter, smoother, richer, clearer, add any adjective you like, it's the sound of good audio transformers.

Build quality is great, rock solid and classy and made in England just up t'road. If I had any criticisms it would be LPF's would have been handy and the included USB cable is not great quality at all. I think at this level, a very good quality cable should be included.

Amazing sound and won't date like other interfaces do. Can't recommend highly enough!