Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 Reviews

5.0/5.0 based on 7 customer reviews

Sweetwater Advice

Carson McClain

The Komplete Audio 6 is a seriously heavy-duty interface. If you were blindfolded and held it in one hand and had any other similarly-sized interface in the other hand, you'd choose this because it has some serious weight and a high-quality feel to it. The convertors in this are a night and day difference between almost ANY other interface in its category. I would put this head to head with almost any interface under $1000 dollars and I guarantee it would come out with flying colors in specs, performance, and customer satisfaction. This is the best interface for the price, it's the best interface if it were double the price. Do yourself a huge favor and add this to your rig, you will not be dissappointed. (BTW, it has Cirrus Logic convertors.)

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Customer Reviews

Mike S
from Los Angeles, CA
March 24, 2012 Music Background:
Studio Owner, Recording Artist

Excellent Buy

I love this interface: rock solid and plenty of routing options while running flawlessly via USB. The audio quality if clean with lots of signal getting to your DAW.

WSCollective
from Bay Area, California
February 25, 2012 Music Background:
Record Label

This thing is Awesome

Specs are one thing, real world is another.
we have listened to a lot of mixes on a lot of different systems over the years and . have owned and used the full gamut in our studio from
1) Seasound Solo(ist)
2) Echo Layla
3) SSL Madixtreme w/ AlphaLink
4) Profire 2626
5) Lexicon converters
6) Avid converters
7) M-Audio Project Mix IO
8) A&H Zed-R 16
9) Komplete Audio 6.
10) MOTU 2408MK3
11) Ao0gee Rosetta

We have worked in such a way that we have had to move around from different recording and mixing environments depending on what studio we are working in, who is recording, mixing, etc...and then finally take the final mixes back to our studio (and final mix, master and monitor on OUR convertors),
Those that sounded best and translated the most from memory and feel, are:
1) Seasound (no more drivers, sadly)
2) Komplete Audio 6
3) SSL
3) Apogee Rosetta
4) Echo layla (horrible drivers btw)
4) A&H Zed
5) Profie 2626
6) MOTU
7) Project Mix (again, drivers just are NOT good on this)
8) Lexicon
9) Avid (sound like mixing through a tin can. Hard to believe every major pro studio in the world runs these horrible sounding digi converters. Thank GOD for mastering engineers)

I kid you not, a 300 dollar audio interface that sounds better than the higher end, higher priced Apogee, Digi and SSL stuff? ABSOLUTELY in the Ball park with the SSL and Apogee for 1/10th the price.
Add to this little guy, a good monitoring system (such as Dangerous D box or [SPL Phonitor-if you mix only in headphones *sic we feel the Dangerous better than the overpriced Phonitor but both are outstanding monitoring systems] and you have a setup that will allow you to mix release quality records ITB

paul stappenbeck
from Seattle, WA USA)
January 13, 2012 Music Background:
student

great

paul stappenbeck
from Seattle, WA USA)
January 13, 2012 Music Background:
student

great

Jahmontee
from Flagstaff, AZ
December 6, 2011 Music Background:
Artist, Producer, DJ, Leathersmith!

Rock solid!

Bought it originally for my MacBook Pro. I liked it so much I bought a second on for my iMac setup! This thing is bad-a** and full of possiblities!

Paul A.
from Woodbridge, VA
August 11, 2011 Music Background:
Hobbyist

Excellent Audio device

I purchased this device from Sweetwater. Cheers to my Sweetwater engineer Chris Lewis. This is a very user friendly audio interface. This replaces my M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB. If you have an existing internal card (PCI or PCIe), this will not conflict with the cards. This audio interface will install with no issues. If you have an onboard card, make sure to disable it from the BIOS. Low latency and excellent sound. If you experience dropouts, pops, and crackles, make sure to turn off non-essential programs running in the background. The less background software you are running, the more you can allocate CPU resources. Overall, this device is great for recording and generating softsynths, or any type of audio medium you wish to use it for. Highly recommended.

Cale McCollough
from Eugene, OR
July 15, 2011 Music Background:
Musician, Audio and Recording Enineer, Computer Engineer, Music Technology Expert, Student, Horn Player

Lowest latency out of any audio interface I've used.

I defiantly like this audio interface a lot. I was shocked about how low the round trip latency between the card and the PC is. At 256 samples/sec, there was just barely a faint hint of phasing when running the signal into Live and back out and I was able to track vocals with software effects without a problem. The headphone output is just loud enough, but not blaringly loud... I expected it be a bit louder, but it is sufficient for DJing. Its defiantly not weak, just not defining. As for the mic-pres, same thing, just enough gain. They are very quiet though and very transparent. There is a small bit of noise that come from them when the gain is cranked all the way up but its a lot quieter then the background noise the mic is picking up and is not distinguishable from it because of the transparency of the pres. Its actually rather pleasing. As for the converters, the specs list it at being around 101 dB dynamic range, which is low for on paper, but specs on paper do not equal real life performance... they use Cirrus Logic converters, which are FAR superior then most of the other converters on the market. Most companies list the specs of the converters on paper, but do not distinguish between the connection straight into the chip and the actual full circuit, which is something that a German engineer would not do... There are other components in between the ADC/DAC and the actual audio input/output that reduce the on chip specs. When you turn volume and speakers all the way up with no audio playing, there is absolutely no noise, which is a very good thing. Its a very beautiful audio interface though. Defiantly a product of German engineering. Very elegant looking and feels very well built. It can also direct monitor the audio inputs so you can hood an external audio device into inputs 3/4 and not convert from analog to digital and back to analog, which is critical. And best of all, it has a SPDIF IO and its bus powered. I would have given it 4 1/2 stars, but the low round trip latency makes up for any deficiencies in the audio interface. Its way better then any of the other USB options anywhere near this price point. If your looking for a mobile interface that does what you need it to do, this is defiantly it.