I purchased a Mackie Onyx Artist 1.2 & a Behringer UMC 202 HD to play pianoteq through studio monitors.
I first wanted to get a Schiit Dac but the customer service never got back to me so don't want to give them money if they don't even care to e-mail back....

Anyways the Mackie Interface was quite good, latency 2.7ms with my MacBook. However the MacBook's internal sound card achieves also 2.7 ms and the sound is the same. I could never tell when connected directly to the MacBook or via Interface. The roundtrip latency in Logic was about 2ms better with the interface.

The Behringer sound quality was worse than my MacBook's or the Mackie's. I'm not recording anything that's why I wanted to get a DAC only in the first place ... but I wanted something to drive my studio monitors however the MacBook is doing an equivalent job as the interfaces tested.... so it's hard to justify $100 for no improvement and no difference.

Anyway, thought might be interesting to know and share these experiences.

(Update) - uh, got confused there for a few minutes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but WASAPI is the same as Windows Audio (Exclusive Mode), right? I used to avoid Windows Audio, thinking I would get horrible latency, but I tried it just now and (touch wood) it seemed fine. Played lots of crazy notes in the bass with the pedal on and got away with it! That's not the way I normally play the piano so WA should be great if I want to use my audio DAC.

This Windows audio driver issue is one of the factors that makes people look at Linux, isn't it? On Linux, when it's set up with a low-latency kernel, you can use a good quality audio DAC without worrying about drivers. I did experiment with Linux Mint a while ago, I liked it, but the computer I installed it on no longer works. Looks like I might need to get back into Linux...

Also one more question to you Evil Dragon:

Will the Mackie Onyx Artist audio interface be also in the same ballpark as the Focusrite Scarlett?

Thanks again!

Scarlett uses Cirrus Logic CS4272, IIRC.

All of these are more or less in the ballpark...

I just thought since I am not using ANY of the Scarlett's features except using it as a "DAC" but I paid for the preamps, instrument inputs etc....

I thought maybe the R&D of the Schiit purely as a DAC will sound better since they solely focus on that except focusing providing an all in one solution in form of an interface...

Thought maybe somebody has had the chance to have tried this setup with Pianoteq so far

Do they even have ASIO drivers? If not, your Scarlett would be better.

I believe not, I would use it with a MacBook, as far as my research goes they's use core audio then since Macs don't need the ASIO right?

Thanks for your input!