Thunderbolt is not required for your very small demand of channels.
It does not give you any noticebaly advantage in terms of ASIO driver round trip time (RTT).
RTT = required time for an audio signal to be transferred from the recording interface to the DAW and back.
Please review again the Excel table, which I already posted, as I have a certain feeling that you might have read it,
but didnt understand. The intention of this Excel is to demonstrate to you, that RME drivers are so good,
that there is no big difference between USB2, USB3, FW, Thunderbold in terms of RTT.
Thunderbolt simply makes the recording interface unnecessary expensive and limits the choices of
- recording interface,
- but also the mainboard
You didn't mention whether its required for you, to have 2 analog inputs and 2 XLR ports to be used at the same time.
Some interfaces have a combo input, where you can plug the one or the other.
For:
- MIDI
- 2 x Analog in for Keyboards
- 2 x XLR inputs
- <= $1200
Babyface Pro, Fireface UC and eventually for a few bucks more: Fireface UCX, MADIface Pro.
If you want an FX chip to be on board:
- BBF Pro, partial implementation (some effects calculated on the PC by the driver)
- UC no FX chip
- UCX, full implementation of FX chip
- MADIface Pro, partial implementation (some effects calculated on the PC by the driver)
See also my comparison sheet here: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/index.ph … 17-12-pdf/
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13