The RME Fireface 800 is by no means any low quality bad sounding audio interface. Even though I've talked "bad" about the digital converters in it, it's still very quiet and good sounding with plenty of good features! But I think the difference in sound quality is noticable if you step a higher in price and want the best professional sound possible, like I want... I think I would choose differently if I would have 10 audio interfaces to choose from and the RME Fireface would be one of the cheapest of them.

Today I have sound checked the whole day to see what the RME Fireface 800 truly gives and it is once again very interesting to notice that even though I run the audio interface at 192KHz the digital conversion is touching the analog sound so much that it is easily noticable by ear. What goes in doesn't come out. I have tweaked and tweaked and tweaked but it is not possible to compensate the loss in sound quality when the signal is converted from analog to digital. What happens with the sound picture is that it is squeezed together a little, so a little of the stereo picture and a little reverb resonance is cut off. This feels like the sound is becoming a little less in stereo. I've tried compensating with stereo imager plug-ins but it doesn't make the sound the same as analog. I have had several persons to listen live and they say the same thing, they notice a difference.

I had thought that the more expensive audio interfaces of today are so good that you really can't hear a difference between an unconverted and a converted signal. I don't know if the best possible converters of today really are as good as that, but this is the kind of level that the RME Fireface 800 audio interface is on.

[This message has been edited by YamahaAndy (edited 05-05-2005).]