There's cheaper alternatives, but I'm already used to the pre amps in my Audient audio interface and I quite like them. Easy to setup and use, expanding the inputs and outputs with ADAT is really why I bought it and it does that very well. The sound quality is pretty good, can't tell the difference with my interface. 4/5 quality because the front buttons doesn't feel very sturdy, especially the volume knob, we'll see on the long run.