Sometimes 80% of what you pay is for the name on the box, not the box itself. I have no way of knowing if this is true in this particular case, and it's more than likely an excellent unit, but I know for a fact that you can get excellent units for much less money. I would look for comparison videos before I pulled that solid gold trigger.
Neumann is one of the few companies where the price/reliability/quality is in line. Considering the quality of their products, I would even go as far as to say that compared to their competition eg. their KH310; KH80 etc monitors are rather underpriced. Or you can look at their NDH30 headphones, as far as it's performance the closest rivals of it are nearly double the price. Perhaps I sound too much like a Neumann fanboy but there are so many studio investments I made and later I regretted it because
a.) their on paper advertised performance were much better than their actual performance;
b.) because a company stopped supporting the product;
c.) because it was impossible to find replacement parts;
d.) because some major failure and it just stopped working after a few years;
e.) because it just wasn't built for real life daily studio abuse;
f.) ....
Non of these things ever happened to any of my Neumann stuff.
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If you look at what Neumann crammed into this new MT48 interface... there is zero competition with the same quality and functionality at this price point. Whether someone needs this quality of conversion, whether someone needs or can benefit from all these functionalities is a different question. It's not just an exceptional audio quality interface (136dB-A resolution which is insane in itself) but it's way more than that.
- It's a 48 channel mixer,
- it's preamps can give you up to 78dB gain;
- it has got 2 great headphone amps with crossfeed/stereo bleeding option,
- it's DSP give you quality EQ, all the Dynamics processors you'll ever need, Reverb...
If you're interested about it's capabilities eg. watch this video from NAMM:
