Audient EVO 8 USB Audio Interface

The Audient EVO 8 audio interface is an excellent choice for anyone seeking professional recording quality in a compact and user-friendly package. The sound quality is clear and precise, with very low background noise, allowing for highly faithful vocal and instrument recordings. Setup is quick and easy, compatible with most DAWs and operating systems. The preamps are powerful and clean, and the Smartgain feature helps automatically set recording levels. Additionally, the physical controls are intuitive and convenient during recording sessions. In short, the EVO 8 is reliable, versatile, and delivers professional performance at a reasonable price. Ideal for musicians, podcasters, and producers seeking a high-quality audio interface.

I purchased this Audient Evo 8 interface after doing a ton of research to replace my old Motu M8. This unit has some serious quality-of-life aspects worth considering. First, the build quality is excellent. The control knob is an excellent feature, allowing you to control several parameters beyond just master volume. It's very intuitive and it syncs with your DAW and OS seamlessly. Admittedly, the auto-gain feature was low on my priority list (if you know how to set gain it's a no-brainer). But it's absolutely worth considering, the ease and convenience of being able to hit one button and set levels for all channels on-the-fly is incredible! It's such a simple feature, but don't overlook it! It helps a ton to keep you focused on the creative process and less time sound designing when you're working on material. I'm a huge fan of the 1/4in guitar input on the front of the unit. It's powered by a JFET as a preamp, so gain staging is true-to-form with other high quality JFET amplifiers (think Orange amps, Quilter, etc) and in my opinion is a criminally overlooked feature. I didn't realize how much my DI tone was lacking until I plugged into the 1/4 guitar in jack and heard my guitar come to life with ease. Additionally, the headphone out's on the front of the unit are just as incredible as the 1/4in in! I'm not sure what Audient uses as a preamp, but this unit absolutely brings my high impedance headphones to life with crisp highs and articulate low-midrange. In comparison to other interfaces I've used in the past (Motu, Focusrite, M-Audio), the impression I got from Audient's entry-level Evo interface has impressed me so much that I plan on using strictly Audient interfaces from here on out. There's something about the quality of preamps that they used, coupled with the seamless integration with my various DAW's and across operating systems that makes me wish that I knew about Audient sooner. Can't recommend this product enough, for beginner and professional.

I'm using this audio interface to run three microphones and an instrument line into a computer running Reaper as a DAW. I'm running monitors out of the interface as well as headphones. The instrument line is the direct input from a guitar (electric or acoustic-electric), one mic for vocals, one mic for the acoustic guitar, one mic for my wife's ukulele. This interface sounds great, it's completely transparent as far as I can tell. The mic pre-amps are fantastic, I haven't had any issues dialing in the proper gain and they don't color the sound at all. Getting used to sparse physical controls and using the EVO app to control most of the interface's functions took a moment to get used to, but it really wasn't a challenge at all. The one function that I absolutely love is the SmartGain feature. Press the SmartGain button, press the button of the channel(s) that you want to set the gain on, press the SmartGain button again, and start playing/singing/speaking. That's it! After it sets the gain, I'll tweak it slightly if I get spikes during recording, but most of the time, it gets the gain right where it needs to be, or within a few ticks of it. My one complaint about the unit is that it's too light. I wish it had more physical heft and weight to it. When all of the cables are plugged into the back of the device, the front lifts up from the weight of the cables. I've had to put a small block under the cables to prevent this.

This is a great interface. The price is cheaper than those with comparable specs, like the Focusrite Scarlett 4i4, but the quality is definitely still there. The signal you get is clean, the accompanying program gui is pretty straightforward and simple as well. The instructions included in the box are pretty clear, but just make sure you actually take the time to read them *prior* to plugging in. I was not so patient, so I got to learn the hard way that if the interface is plugged in while the drivers are installing, the process will completely freeze at some point, with no error message. When I first tried, I left it for 30 minutes only to find that it made no progress. Attempting to unplug the interface at that point didn't do anything, and neither did trying to cancel. The problem ended up escalating to the point of having to reinstall windows. In spite of that, it is still a great interface. The only reason I'm giving 4 stars instead of 5 is because I do think there should be some sort of failsafe to prevent the problem from occuring. At the very least, throw up an error message before trying to install drivers if the interface is already plugged in. There are also a few features that would've been cool to have, such as the ability to open the mixer app on startup, but it's not a very big deal.

I was looking for the most compact and hopefully good sounding audio interface out there... This is it! Firstly, it's quite small! I actually like the minimal control surface. Bought a case designed for the Marshall Emberton speaker and stretched it a bit so it could fit the Evo 8 comfortably. It's not perfect but now I have a nice portable setup that I don't have to worry much about damaging. The Evo 8 sounds really great. For the price? I'm thoroughly impressed. The preamps are what I expected, low noise and very clean. Perhaps too clean? This is subjective of course. Compared to the preamps I use in my MR816x the preamps in the Evo 8 lack a bit of mojo. At home I'm recording with the MR816x instead of the Evo. I still haven't used the instrument input much so it's hard for me to describe other than that it sounds quite acceptable to me with my electric guitars going into amp sims. The instrument input didn't wow me or anything, it just works. The auto gain feature could prove useful to others but in my case I never use it. The Evo 8 line outputs and headphone outputs sound amazing! They really give my MR816x a run for it's money. In fact this Evo 8 has replaced my MR816x entirely for listening/mixing duties ITB. It sounds better, there's more detail, really I'm hearing stuff I wasn't hearing from my MR816x. Does that mean more accurate? I don't really know. But I do know I'm more excited to mix on the Evo 8 and my work doesn't end up sounding drastically different on other systems compared to working on the MR816x. Results are similar so I think it's great. There is one issue with the Evo 8 and I assume this will occur with the Evo 4 as well. The chassis doesn't appear to be shielded in a way that would prevent a cellphone signal from popping up in your audio. I've tested the Evo 8 using a power delivery passthrough USB C hub and my android phone. Phantom power was available for all mic inputs and using Audio Evolution Mobile Studio with their USB driver allowed me to record just fine at low latency. However as I already mentioned, there was cellphone interference bleeding into my recordings and outputs. I haven't tried to resolve this issue myself yet since I've primarily been using the Evo 8 with a desktop and a laptop. I would use a longer USB cable and make sure the cellphone and Evo are far enough away from each other that there's no interference. I have no interference from my cellphone being on me while I'm using the Evo with my desktop or laptop. So I dunno, maybe the Evo being connected to a cellphone at all is causing problems. If I find out more I'll update this review. All in all I can't believe Audient have packed so much into such a small audio interface. There's nothing out there like it when you account for it's portability. The zoom stuff is cool but the sound is lacking to my ears. This Evo 8 sounds incredible and I'm definitely checking out other Audient products in the future when I inevitably need to replace what I have in the future. I think the folks at Audient really know what they are doing. If I could say anything to Audient about the Evo 8 it would be... "Shield that thang!". Still, I'm giving the Evo 8 a full 5 stars.

This product is buggy (as others have written) and has terrible support. In particular: 1. Will not update it's firmware on an M1 Mac 2. Support is only by email -- and they take days to respond. The feature set of the product is good. The construction quality is flimsy,weak plastic - but for the price it is acceptable. But I don't play to buy any more Audient products. Here is my story... I purchased a brand new unit and plugged it into two different M1 Macs (a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air). In both cases the software said it needed a firmware update. OK, fine, but the firmware updater failed on both Macs. So I contacted Audient. Turns out they ONLY offer email support - and it took them five days to respond. Finally they emailed me a file and said "update the firmware manually with this file". I did but it still failed on both devices. Their instructions said if that failed to boot my Mac into "recovery mode" and try again. I did and it still failed. So I emailed them again. After several more days of not hearing back I was just about to return the unit when I had the idea of borrowing someone's Windows machine and trying to update it from there. Worked fine, firmware updated right away. After that the unit worked fine on the Macs. But... ...shouldn't Audient fully support M1 Macs? (as of this review M1s have been selling for nearly 2 years) ...shouldn't Audient respond quicker than 5 days to a support email? ...shouldn't Audient offer real-time support (chat or phone) like the other audio interface vendors?

What I like 1. simple design with good software 2. quiet preamps 3. great price for 4 preamps 4. usb output is multichannel 5. works great with new iPad Pro What I don't like 1. cheap build quality 2. some controls..such as monitor out...needs software to work. Overall, lots of feature for the price. At first I wasn't thrilled, b/c compared to my other interfaces, it's a bit too simplistic in both good and bad way...but it's great b/c I can set up a multi channel podcast using garage band on my iPad or MBP and have up to 4 mic inputs. It's very quiet and can drive the re20 mic without issues. I paid $169 for a 'like new' condition from Alto Music ..... it came still wrapped tight brand new...$169 for a 4 mic interface is excellent.

Easy setup for live performance. I needed run two midi keyboards through my DAW (Reason 13) with separate outputs. This gave me exactly what I needed.