# UAD Arrow vs RME Babyface



## milesaaron (Nov 27, 2018)

Long time lurker, first time poster

Currently in the process of making some major upgrades to my home studio as part of furthering my hobby in music and, in particular, virtual orchestration/mocks up. Until recently, I was pretty set on upgrading to a UAD Arrow for the following reasons: 

a) Unison pre-amps and tracking with UAD plug-ins
b) Bus-powered/portable
c) Relatively inexpensive

However, I've always known that RME have been the industry leaders when it comes to audio interfaces because of their drivers and latency performance and this has been confirmed by many posts I have seen in this forum. I have therefore been strongly considering the RME Babyface Pro, which is about 250 pounds more expensive than the Arrow, which is not a problem if I am going to see a huge difference. I therefore wanted to get the opinion of the hive mind as to which interface I should go for that would best suit my needs and gear.

For your information, I will be running the interface on the new 6-core top spec i7 mac mini. For my orchestral work I'll be using Cubase and for all other work I'll be using Logic Pro X. I'd basically like to know how much better performance I will get in terms of buffer size, latency and overall CPU performance if I decide to go for the RME over the Arrow. I know that drivers are more critical when running on Windows, so I'm wondering if running the Arrow on Mac negates some of these issues. I've seen a couple of posts in other threads that suggest the Arrow's performance is underwhelming, but I wanted to know if anyone can give any first hand experience.

Just a quick note: I am aware that the Arrow only has one DSP chip. I do not plan on using it for mixing, but I occasionally record vocalists and it would be nice to use for tracking but I am not prepared have this perk if it will compromise my orchestral templates. The Arrow also lacks a MIDI input, which is another benefit of the babyface pro.

Thanking you in advance!

A-


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