I have the original and the new sonic port and yes, both have lower input levels than other interfaces I have. The mics of this new version sucks, too much noise on them. I thought it was a problem of my device but a friend has the same problems, it's a bad piece of gear, forget about quality here. I would like to ear a mic demo of someone out of line6, has I believe they use some kind of audio processing on their videos. It's impossible they can reach son low background noise on the recordings.