Audio Interfaces - How do people feel about them?

[ChaosGoW]

Maybe I'm just looking for validation in this universe of computer nerds but for a LONG time, I've never used internal sound cards or even external headphone amp things that are becoming popular these days.

They were, I admit, more of a requirement for me considering I've been in and out of bands for most of my life so the ability to record my guitar amps and other musical gear was a huge plus. I've still always used them for games too though since it was already setup. In the early days of me doing this, I had a TC Electronics Konnect 24d which would produce some strange errors and some games would outright not work but even then I could get around that by using the optical out of my motherboard instead of the firewire port the interface required. I think a lot of the issues that that particular unit caused were because of the DSP chip on the device. The DSP unit helped take the workload off of the CPU when using VST plugins in my DAW software (back then I used cubase, I've moved on since then but that's not important). Some time after this, I found myself needing more IO on my interface so I sidegraded to a Focusrite Saffire PRO40. The converters (DA/AD) weren't quite as good, neither were the pre-amps but it had 8 pre-amps and that's what I needed more than anything. Things got a lot better for gaming here though, all my games worked and sounded really good, much better than the £1000 sound rig my parents had in their living room and worlds better than the onboard sound I had been using been using because my old unit didn't play well with games.

Since then I've done a LOT of experimenting and found that I much prefer the audio interface over the external headphone amp DACS that people are using because I have a lot more control over a lot more devices and still get the benefit of taking some of the load off my computer and onto my external device.

To give you some context, here's a quick diagram I made of my setup. Something I couldn't do if I had some other kind of device to handle my audio.

My particular audio interface allows me to control the levels of every in and out via midi so I could use a control surface as a mixer but I've found I'm happy with a software interface and just a volume knob for everything. The software interface allows me to set levels, mono, pan and mute/solo some IO which is great for when I want to play with my xbox and not worry about my tablet making annoying sounds but also allows me to listen to youtube videos on my PC while playing with that same xbox. For context, here's a screenshot of part of the GUI for my interface.

I could probably get very similar results if I use an external sound card/DAC and a mixer but that's just more junk on my desk. It'd be nice to have the hardware faders and buttons for what I now do in software but I can get over having to click on things for the sake of having room for elbows on my desk. I could also use an AV receiver but I wouldn't be able to listen to 2 things at once and I'm not interested in losing that ability.

How would you manage this kind of setup? If you have a similar setup, how do you manage it?

Im genuinely interested in how others do it. For entertainment value and I'll hopefully learn something from you awesome guys!