Top 17 Most Popular Audio Interface Brands (As Voted For By You)

If you want to get audio into and out of your DAW, you'll need an audio interface. We were surprised when we asked you which audio interface brand you owned in our recent survey. Here's the results!  

During August and September 2015 we ran a huge music gear contests, with a massive $33,000 worth of hardware and software prizes on offer. As part of the contest we asked you to complete a survey about your music production habits. One of the questions was about your primary audio interface. Almost 25,000 musicians and producers gave their answer. 

Yes, the results are in… and this one is surprising. Perhaps an oversight on our part not to include “Built-in computer audio” or "I don't own an audio interface," as options, but “Other” was the outright winner out of all 17 named brands. But what about the named brands? First let’s check out some interesting “facts” from the survey…

  • 25% of Focusrite audio interface owners use Ableton Live, while just 15% use Logic Pro X. 
  • Nearly 40% of Apogee owners use Logic Pro X as their primary DAW.
  • Over one quarter of Universal Audio interface owners use Pro Tools as their primary DAW, 
  • 33% of Steinberg audio interface users prefer using Cubase.
  • Only 10% of Focusrite interface owners consider themselves primarily as singer/songwriters, while 27% consider themselves producers.
  • 14.5% of M-Audio interface owners use FL Studio, and marginally more use Ableton Live at 16.5%.

The Best Audio Interface Brand?

With so many different features on offer from interface to interface and every budget possible involved, there simple is no “best” audio interface. There might well be a best for you needs or workflow. So when choosing an audio interface it’s a good idea to look at brand popularity, read reviews online and ensure it has the connectivity you require, the number of inputs and outputs and features as low latency as possible. 

So, out of aprox. 25k musicians, producers and engineers who answered our survey, let’s take a look at the results.

And The Most Popular audio interface manufacturer (as Voted For By You) Is…

Bear in mind, that only one audio interface brand could be chosen from our survey list. So many of us who use two or more interfaces were forced to choose their “primary” one. This means some interfaces might appear to be less popular than they are in our results. However, this still makes for interesting reading, especially as most audio interface manufacturer's are hesitant to publish figures about their sales and users. These results give us a snap shot of what a cross-section of us consider their favourite audio interface brands.

Most popular audio interface brands 2015

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  • Akai Pro 4.06%
  • Alesis 1.40%
  • Apogee 3.50%
  • Audient 0.42%
  • Avid 6.22%
  • Behringer 2.87%
  • Focusrite 16.97%
  • iConnectivity 0.25%
  • M-Audio 12.89%
  • MOTU 3.63%
  • Native Instruments 9.80%
  • Novation 1.30%
  • PreSonus 5.53%
  • Steinberg 3.38%
  • Tascam 2.67%
  • Universal Audio 3.61%
  • Yamaha 2.78%
  • Other 18.70%

Just because we love stats and we love you all, here's an interesting infographic focusing on the top 5 audio interface brands. You can download it as a PDF here.

Ask.Audio Most popular Audio Interface 2015
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Rounik is the Executive Editor for Ask.Audio & macProVideo. He's built a crack team of professional musicians and writers to create one of the most visited online resources for news, review, tutorials and interviews for modern musician and producer. As an Apple Certified Trainer for Logic Pro Rounik has taught teachers, professional... Read More

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