Post

the 4i4 is about as small an interface as I would ever recommend anyone to buy

this is due to the 4 outputs - 2 for monitors 2 for sending audio out to process and re-record - any smaller and you can't do this unless you don't want to listen to what you are doing - which makes life very difficult imo

-- JimHowell1970

Out of curiosity, does anyone use headphones out of their AI?

I almost exclusively use monitors for mixing, but curious if studio headphones are ok for just playing around?
-- cj18

Not currently as I use an es8 as an audio interface (no headphone output) - but in the past I have - there is absolutely no need for monitors unless "mixing", even then arguably without acoustic room treatment, headphones may be better, depending on the headphones!

for "just playing around" I have used all sorts - laptop speakers, headphones, tiny rechargeable speakers and monitors

currently I use a tesseract tex-mix for mixing the output of which goes to an external mixer (an old yamaha mg10) and from there to either headphones or a pair of yamaha monitors (might be msp8s)

NB headphones won't help with the less than 4 channels problem - headphone outs are usually copies of channels 1 & 2, so you wouldn't be able to listen to the mix on headphones and use outputs 1 & 2 for external processing