Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre Studio-Grade 18-in/20-out Audio Interface for Established Producers —Eight High-Performance, Low-Noise, Low-Distortion Mic Preamps Capture Audio with Precise Clarity

Product Information

With the free Focusrite iOS Control app, you can adjust the mixes you made with Focusrite Control on the desktop app from your iPad or iPhone.

Set up was easy, although you may have to do a bit of reading into how to use the software as it can get confusing at first, but once you get your head round it it’s plain sailing.The build quality is superb and is a definite improvement upon the early incarnations of Scarlett interfaces that had rough, sharp edges. ADAT optical input - Expand your interface to make the most of ADAT-compatible outboard equipment such as the Clarett OctoPre, with eight channels of digital expandability. Two powerful and transparent headphone outputs inspire artists to hear every nuance of their sound on any type of headphones, customise their foldback mix, and perform their best.

In the clarett, the potentiometers are designed to operate that way, with most of the gain near the end. The features that were a big step up from the cheap tascam I was using is the monitor section (lovely), the preamps, and the adat possibilities. Air also brought our bog-standard SM58 to life, improving vocal clarity no end and sounding much closer to a condenser than a dull dynamic.One final quibble is that the pre-amp gain doesn’t really extend upwards enough to comfortably handle the likes of the gain-hungry Shure SM7B without becoming a little noisy or running out of headroom when maxed out.

Aside from this, pre-amp controls are very basic – just a gain control for each, with no high-pass filter or polarity switch. Every Clarett+ ships with the Focusrite Classic Red 2 and Red 3 plug-in suite, which accurately models Focusrite's classic Red range EQ and compression hardware, and the Brainworx bx_console Focusrite SC, which faithfully captures the sound, feel, and style of the original Focusrite ISA 110 Equaliser and ISA 130 Dynamics Modules.That translates in the real world to a marginally clearer, cleaner, and more transparent source recording, especially if tracking with generous headroom margins.

Meanwhile, bare-bones monitor controls work well for the most part, but it’s strange that there’s no button to check the mix in summed mono or A-B monitoring between different speaker sets. Capture more accurate recordings wherever you are, with extremely high-performance, independent A-D and D-A converters. I just realized this morning while taking a shower that the hot water is almost exactly like the pres on the Clarett.There might also be circumstances where the lack of any pads could be an issue, but the 57dB gain range on offer should accommodate nearly all input signals without too much trouble.