Universal Audio Apollo Twin X Duo Gen2 Studio+

Having recently moved from a five bedroom house with a home studio to a one bedroom apartment, I needed to drastically reduce the footprint of a lot of my gear. No longer having the space for rack gear, I needed an interface that could fit on my desk but still provide the necessary essentials.

Barely larger than about four or five stacked CD cases (for those who remember what size those were), this provides the Hi-Z and mic/line inputs, headphone and monitor outs and keeps everything easily to hand (an accessible physical volume control is soooo useful).

The included controller software is stable and fairly intuitive, the preamps are solid and outpace the ones in my FocusRite, and the build quality is perfectly acceptable (yeah, I'm picky). Most of the bundled plugins are great, and running them on the built-in DSPs saves a fair bit of headroom. I use a Mac Pro, but if you're using a less overkill piece of hardware, this could be a very useful feature.

They include their Luna DAW. It's nice enough, but I'm too stuck in my ways with Logic Pro to go DAW hopping now.

If you're recording at home, don't need a dozens of ins/outs and value your desktop real estate, this could be a great fit for you too. If you already have the hardware and plugins you need in the box, get the standard version and save some money for beer and extra strings. The quality of the preamps is worth it over a lot of the lower-priced rivals.