Audient iD14 MKII

The most "popular" review on this site is a disgruntled customer who may have received a unit that got past inspection in poor order or else was damaged in transport. This does every other positive an injustice. My experience of this unit after two weeks has been excellent so far.
Pros:
DA Conversion: Superb - I have interfaces from Zoom (R8), Tascam (US 16-08), Behringer (404HD and UMC 1820, ADA8200 Pre's), Native Instruments, Maschine Mk 3 and ocassionally I use the Digitakt as a DAC when operating in a DAW. I can safely say my unit has by a very audible margin the best output audio quality of any of the aforementioned. The Behringers may beat it in output volume (the 404HD in particular) but the claritiy of the audio with the ID14 is exceptional.
2) Loopback: This features allows you to flawlessly record incoming audio from any source within your computer directly into your DAW. A particularly nice feature for podcasters and OBS users as well.
3) Build is excellent, but I expect that from a "premium" product.
4) 8 x 48K ADAT inputs. This means I can offload the UMC 1820 and the Tascam and upgrade my monitors :)

Cons: wish it had a 5 pin din in/out like all the other units I have.

Highly recommended especially for the additional features.

Nice quality metal chassis. Great sounding input and output preamps.
Enough gain on mic inputs to drive sure sm57 without additional amplification. Gain control could be a bit better. First 90% of gain gives smooth slow change. On last 10% every movement gives much more pronounced changes. Also the last 10% starts to get quite noisy - escpecially so with the phantom power engaged.
Headphone output is great with higher impedence headphones. Unfortunatelly with low impedence headphones it losses its flat response.
The instrument input on the front is great for both low and high output guitars and basses (had some software glitch at first which made high output guitar clip even on lowest gain setting, after reset it handles the output with enough headroom). However using the instrument input takes over one mic input so You can only record two tracks at once, but I think that most interface in this price range behave that way.
My biggest gripe is latency. At buffer size of 32 I am getting about 7 ms round trip latency on 2020 Macbook M1 (tested with rtl utility and cable looping back output to input). It's about the same that my 12 year old Komplete Audio interface. It's not that bad for tracking guitar (depending of course on additional latency introduced by plugins used) but tracking vocals with this latency gets quite annoying.
The software mixer that comes with the interface is very nice. You can create seperate mixes and easily control the routing of inputs to ouputs. Internal loopback is a nice addition, though it would be nice to be able to assign virtual loopbacks input to different mixer inputs. Now the loopback is on inputs 11 and 12, in some applications (like zoom, teams, discord etc.) you cannot choose which input is being used - they just pass whats on input 1 and 2 by default.
All in all very nice interface. Superb audio quality for the price. If you don't plan on using high gain guitars and don't mind the round trip latency, this is the best audio interface to buy at this price point

I was very pumped about the iD14 mkII. Bus power, LED meters, a massive history in audio industry - everything I knew about Audient and its products brought me to purchase the new iD14. I was disappointed to say the least.

Pros:
- build quality is nice, aesthetically good
- controls on the top panel allow for lots of negative space around them with a smaller form factor than the competitors
- LED meters

Cons:
- drivers implementation is absolute garbage. See issues below
- at times, the interface would be initialised at max volume after connecting it to a Mac or Win computer, thus potentially harming my equipment and ears if I don't remember to touch the big volume knob upon starting the interface. Moving the knob will snap the volume at the correct value, but if you forget to do that, expect to jump on your chair at the first notification you get
- the interface produces a loud pop when powered up, making it fit for mobile setups, not so much for desktop or non-mobile setups where users will want to start their whole gear up with one single action
- when connected to a computer in sleep mode, the iD14 keeps requesting power from the bus source, thus staying on when connected to a sleeping device. This drains the computer's battery very quickly, and it's painful especially with mobile setups
- these issues would be acceptable on Behringer and similar low-budget brands, and none of the above is happening anyway on those products. An Audient product at that price point simply cannot show such problems, and this puts this product way below the competition
- all the issues above were reported to Audient's support centre, which proven inadequate as far as helping fixing them. Long response times, useless suggestions, no reporting of the issue to engineers that could fix it. I was basically asked to do QA on those issues for free. That can't happen.

Very, very disappointed with the product and the brand in general.

This interface not only has high quality converters and clean class A preamps, but even a solid metal chassis and sturdy controls both for the preamps and for the volume knob/iD control, which I love for a product that's meant to live many years.
The multiple features are hard (if not impossible) to find in other interface of the same price/level, like the 2 different earphones output (with different DAC) or the combined ADAT-S/PDIF input or even the 4 line outputs, allowing you to build a pro quality home studio and to use different setups at a very affordable price.
Thanks to Thomann for the impeccable delivery (and price!) and to Audient for a fantastic and gorgeous piece of art!