Home Studio Gear: Interfaces, Microphones, Monitors and Treatment

Two things are true of every page in this section. The picks are presented at three tiers rather than as one winner, because a $100 interface and a $999 interface are answering different questions. And the expert tier always says who should not buy it, because talking someone down is what makes the rest of the list worth reading.

Category roundups

Each of these picks a beginner, an intermediate and an expert option and says who should not buy the expert one. Start here if you have not chosen a product yet.

Single product reviews

These are for the point after you have decided. Each one names the product's real weakness in its own section, because the reason to read a review is to find out what will annoy you in six months. None of these products has been tested here: the pages are built from published manufacturer specifications, acoustic principle and the consensus of verified owner reports, and they say so.

What order should you buy in?

The order matters more than the total, and the right order is close to the reverse of what most people do.

1. Interface, microphone, stand, cables, headphones, together. The smallest set that lets you record anything. Buying these piecemeal means owning parts of a chain that cannot do anything on their own.
2. Corner absorption. Before the monitors, always. Every mode in the room has a pressure maximum in a corner, so absorption there works on all of them at once. This is what makes recordings start sounding like the room is not fighting you.
3. First reflection point panels. Found with a mirror at ear height, cheap, and the reflections that most directly damage the stereo image.
4. Monitors and isolation stands. Now they can tell you the truth, because the corners are handled and the room is no longer the loudest thing in the signal path.
5. Everything that widens what you can do. A second microphone of a different type, a controller, a DI box, a desk.

How the picks are chosen

Three filters, applied in order.

Real brands only. Focusrite, Universal Audio, Audient, MOTU, RME, Shure, Audio-Technica, Rode, Neumann, KRK, Yamaha, Adam Audio, JBL, Beyerdynamic, Sennheiser, AKG, Auralex, Primacoustic. No-name equivalents exist and are occasionally fine, and they are not recommended at the intermediate or expert tiers because the failure modes are unpredictable and the support is nonexistent.

Published specifications, verified owner reports, and acoustic principle. The physics of what a 3.5 inch woofer can reproduce is not a matter of opinion. Neither is the absorption coefficient of 2 inch mineral wool at 125 Hz. Where a claim can be checked against a published figure or a physical principle, it is.

A stated limitation on every pick. A recommendation that lists only strengths is a sales page. Every product named here carries the thing it is not good at, and where a product is not the right purchase for most readers, the page says so plainly.

The picks at a glance

If you want the short version before reading any individual roundup, these are the defaults each one lands on for a typical small home room.

Where to go instead of a roundup

If you want a complete kit rather than one category at a time, the complete builds put every item together at three budgets with running totals, which is a far more useful starting point than nine separate roundups. If you are comparing two specific options, the comparisons section takes each decision head to head and names a winner.

And before any purchase, run the free calculations. The room mode calculator and the speaker placement calculator both frequently change what you should buy, and both cost nothing.