What is the DAC resolution and sample rate? Delay/jitter? Noise?
What's the cost of something like this? It's just the NUC and the USB Audio Interface? When I play through my Komplete Audio interface and my laptop I (think?) I notice a delay. How would that compare to an off-the-shelf multi-effect modeller? In cost and features/performance.
These have always interested me but not enough to actually do something ;)
The NUC was used and just cost me a replacement fan. USB audio interface was cheap from online classified. The touchscreen was just over a $100 on AliExpress, plus a bunch of cables of various sizes and angles to connect it all.
I've done the bare minimum to get this all going and haven't done any optimizations. Sampling at 48kHz. Load is about 5-6% even with a complex effects chain. I don't notice any latency, but I haven't measured it. Latency isn't an issue for the experimental instrument I play. The electroduochord.
DAC resolution is irrelevant if your analog electronics produce noise in the lowest N bits. This is why I advice against using this as a primary comparison metric between audio interfaces.
Any audio interface with 24 bits has a digital dynamic range of 144 dB. Bad interfaces will have a noise floor of -80 dBm, the theoretical best value you can reach (at room temperature, for an audio band of 20kHz¹) is -131 dBm, interfaces for more than a 1000 Euros can reach around -127.
And this all assumes ideally set gain levels. Since this is rarely always the case in the real world 32 bit interfaces can still make sense, IF you have analog electronics that can deal with the signals to give you some extra headroom on top. But I'd still rather get a 24 bit interface with stellar noise figures, than a mediocre one with 32.
Aside from the proper input Impedance (High Z), the noise figures are probably the single most important thing when selecting a audio interface for guitar applications, especially if you plan to add a ton of gain in software. Of course drivers, latency etc. also need to work, but I have found that even cheap interfaces do a decent job at that nowadays.
¹: note that with bigger bandwidth that number gets worse, so if you record at 192kHz and you don't have analog filters before that cut the frequency band down to audible range you pay for that (proven many times to be inaudible) bandwidth with worse noise figures