Review on External sound card Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen by Micha Bialik (Eagle) ᠌

Name: External sound card Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen
Item: External sound card Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen
Rating: 4

May 13, 2023

Everything is fine, there are only minor drawbacks.

Many years later, I switched from my old Lexicon Alpha to this wonderful box. Purchase, in general, more than satisfied. I can probably recommend it to everyone, since the card, in my opinion, is universal.
Took for writing arrangements and recording electric guitar. Another would be a midi input, and there would be a top for the money, but here it’s already clear why this is the most popular card in the world, among fellows in the price segment. Respect to the Focusrite company, all the creative success! :)

Pros

- Price. The range of prices is large (from 16 to 21 thousand), but this is not the fault of the card itself. Without much difficulty, it can be purchased for 16,000. - Build quality and materials. Nothing anywhere plays, does not stagger, the course of the potentiometers is smooth. - Design. Fits into any home studio, looks quite restrained and modern. You can set the backlight colors in the proprietary utility. A trifle, but nice. - Software included. Individually, it would cost much more than the card itself. And so I downloaded everything and use it with pleasure. - Stuffing. Good preamps. I heard that the Shure sm7b microphone is swinging well, but I haven’t personally tested it. But this plus turned into a small minus for me: through my monitors, interference from the mains is heard. They have become even louder on this card, but it does not really interfere with the work. - Inputs and outputs. For home and not only studios, everything is more than enough. - Independent volume controls for monitor and headphone outputs. For me, this is a killer feature. It is very convenient to switch between devices and you don’t have to pull out the headphones a million times or turn off the monitors in the process of working. - AIR function. I didn’t have time to really run it in practice in order to try it out, but judging by the reviews, the chip is useful. - Support for high sampling rates up to 192 kHz. For me personally, this is redundant, but it will come in handy for "surgical" work with sound.

Cons

- Initial setup. For a very long time I fiddled with the elimination of crackling when playing sound both in the windows system and in FL Studio. Because of what, in fact, 4 stars, not 5. As far as I know, this problem has long been known and very common. The complexity is added by the fact that there can be many reasons for this ailment, up to compatibility with the processor. In order to offload the processor when working in a DAW, I set the maximum buffer, but the sounds in the browser are played with wild delays and crackling. I set the optimal buffer to 192 samples and everything was fine. - Length of supplied USB cable c. At my previous zvukovuhi it was 2 times more. - There is no buffer setting in the proprietary utility, I had to go into the DAW (not critical).