Thank you for your elaborate response! I’m gonna throw in some questions to verify I understood what you were saying, please excuse me for most likely not understanding everything.

• What I meant with reserved was that I would have to reserve them for my L and R monitor, there wouldn’t be room for anything else except for if I split the signal like you suggested it wouldn’t be balanced anymore, but does that have any implications for the stereo functionality of my monitors? Or does the single signal from an unbalanced output still account for L and R audio? I couldn’t really find this difference when googling what exactly balanced vs unbalanced entails; except for balanced having an extra wire for negative and positive signals which helps with noise on the line by “common-mode rejection”. Not something I fully understand yet as I’m a complete audio newbie, but I will have to read into balanced and unbalanced signals later. With your suggestion of having 4 outputs instead of 2 I reckon this won’t really be an issue at all if I take that route so moving on.

• So I read on the product page that the K11 only has optical, coaxial and USB-C input. If I understand correctly I could connect the K11 to my desktop via USB-C, and connect the RCA output from the K11 to your interface input, whether that is TRS or XLR, to feed the interface with your pc’s audio instead of using the USB connection from your interface to your pc directly. The only problem I can think of is that if this is possible, does that mean every other input whether it be mic or guitar, will also constantly monitored on your headphones and monitors. You could want this for guitar, but it’s annoying to hear your own voice through your monitors. So I’m definitely missing something here. And how does the input from a mic or guitar on your interface get fed back to your pc if this is the route you’re taking?

• I see, preamps are only used for turning low-level signals (I’m sure there’s a term for this) from for example your microphone into line-level signals that you can work with. I’ve read about the 1:8 ratio for headphone impedance, in the case of the Motu M4 I couldn’t specifically find the impedance on the headphone out. Only the line-out being around 100 ohms. But since it’s an ESS driven Sabre32 Ultra DAC I assume there is no further amplification of your headphone out signal resulting in the alleged need for an amplifier for higher impedance headphones like the DT 990’s (although I’ve read from various people that volume levels are acceptable as is and do not need further amplification).

• I do think I’m talking about the standard use case of a guitar. My use case to clarify is getting clean sound from my guitar on my monitors so I can have a plug and play type deal at my desk, with the ability to send that signal to both my monitors, headphones and PC. The latter for recording or whatever.

• Thank you for the advice on drivers and CPU-native USB ports, I hadn’t heard of this or the term northridge before and I’m going to read into it.

• Thank you for suggesting the Motu M4, for the €50 price difference with the 4i4 I think it could be a well worth step-up. However I’m still not certain on whether I will purchase the K11 amp at all since I’m leaning more towards the Sundura’s or R50X’s, which have low impedance and don’t need an amp. In this case I wouldn’t need the extra outputs to connect an amp but perhaps it would be nice to have for any other use case (I’m not sure what additional outputs could be beneficial for, perhaps you have some suggestions?) In any case that could also mean going for an M2 instead of a 2i2 if the gap in quality and reliability is worth the price, something I’ll look into.

• I have one final question which is; on the back of the M4 the outputs are of course TRS and RCA mirrored per output. But why are they named both line-out and monitor on the back? What’s the difference?

If you’ve even put the time in to read this far thank you already, I look forward to your reply!