I know there are many of you here with great experience of how to do all this surround music on the Mac,
so before I tear anymore of my hair out, in short I'm having a hard time finding a used affordably priced MultiCh Audio Interface
that will play ball over USB with El Capitan.
Can you please help?
Thanks in advance!
First, you might want to stick with 10.10 or earlier for the time being. Might just be a little soon for 10.11.
On the cheap end is Presonus. Focusrite is about the same quality but acts like it's a little better and charges more.
Next up the ladder is MOTU. Their forte is more the digital I/O and routing than the fidelity of their analog stages and converters though. Solid pro quality stuff though.
I have 2 MOTU 828mk3 interfaces at present. The system is stable enough to run live sound (ie. FOH for a full live band production) and that's been SOP for me for years now.
Apogee makes nice analog stages and they have very good converters. RME is also known for similar nice quality converters but they're more expensive than Apogee. (They always seem to come along and offer a competing product to Apogee with that one cool extra feature but then a really inflated price.)
For me, the biggest band for the buck turned out to be Apogee converter units (for the AD & DA) connected digitally to MOTU units (for the interface).
The bad news is the smaller affordable interfaces (like some of the Presonus models on the low end or an Apogee Duet on the high end) only have 2 - 4 inputs.
You need minimum of 6.
Stay away from Behringer and M-Audio. These products are ratty cheap. (Factory second and substitute components. Jacks and connectors that just fall apart. etc)
FYI: If you are transferring a digital audio stream from a DVD player, you DO NOT want to make an analog connection!!! This will introduce noticeable generation loss.
Digital signals must be captured as is. This is actually the easy part if you have a computer. You simply rip the disc to file. Hardware disc players are not involved in the process. You have all the options available with a Mac as far as compatible hardware and apps go. The Windows users have far fewer options.
You are correct that the thunderbolt to firewire adapter gives full firewire functionality. This just works.
You can usually find a MOTU 828mk2 for under $200 on ebay. That would give you 8 balanced line level inputs + 2 mic preamp inputs and 2 instrument DI inputs.
The converters and analog stages would be better than any stand alone hardware DVD player that sells for anything less than $5000. (Hardware players are an incredible ripoff IMHO.)
