Audient iD4 MKII

I bought this just for online meetings, but I noticed the mic preamp is excellent, and way better than I would expect to find at this price point! Sound quality from the headphone out is also good - definitely good enough for monitoring while recording.

I really appreciate having a hardware gain pot like this (instead of software) and it works as it should. But I can't get used to this combination of infinity level pot (with not very useful visual feedback), and the rather coarse input/DAW mix pot. It would be much faster and more accurate to set the input/DAW listening balance with software faders - and actually, that is how they seem to have implemented it on the bigger iD14 MKII model. Looking at the features of that bigger version, it looks like a better value in other ways too, at least if you have use for two input channels.

My iD4MKII has been working without fault when I've hooked it to the Thunderbolt 3 port of a Mac or a PC. But I had problems with regular "blue" USB 3.0 connections: With one "blue" USB on a PC, playback dropped randomly to zero after stopping recording or closing an application (without any visual indication of this). With another USB 3.0 PC, I got it to work only after going through all Windows trouble shooting menus a couple of times, and then after the next restart of the computer the Audient just stopped working entirely - would have required a new install, it seemed. But I gave up on that one.

UPDATE 9.6.2022
I can report the Audient has been working without any problems with the "Always On USB 3.1 connector Gen 1" of my Lenovo Thinkpad. I just have to remember to bring up the heaphone level up from zero, every time when starting a new Teams meeting (with my other audio interfaces the level just stays where I left it last time). The special feature of the Lenovo "always on" USB-connector is that it keeps feeding power to the connected USB device even if I the laptop is put to sleep (unlike the other USB interfaces which I tried before). I think the previous USB problems that I had were related to powering down/up the computer.

When using the Audient with my laptop, and 48v phantom power active, the battery of my Lenovo is being consumed about twice as fast compared to no Audient connected.

I can't really talk about the sound since I have no frame of reference but I can talk about a few other things.

I bought these at the same time as the Drop x Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones (300 ohm), I thought that I would need a separate headphone amplifier thinking that the iD4's headphone out wouldn't be powerful enough for it, I was completely wrong, I even have an EQ on the 6XXs that has a gain decrease of 12.3 dB and the iD4 is still completely capable of getting it to loud levels, granted, I've put the gain all the way up. If you would turn the gain up a bit or leave it untouched (i.e. back to 0 dB), it would get to irrealistic levels.

It has a nice weight to it and feels well made. Knobs feel nice.

Some things I don't like:

— I would have preferred a button to turn the interface off.
— The loudness indicator is kind of annoying when you're using this interface as your main listening device on a desk or something similar, I've currently put it a bit out of my sight so it's not as annoying anymore.