Review on Focusrite Clarett 4 Out Audio Interface by Michelle Smith

Extremely well-made and well thought-out equipment. The ADC and DAC chips were developed a few years ago so are no longer state of the art but still work well and are used by most of Focusrite's competitors in this price range (and slightly higher). ). Wide dynamic range and low noise. In normal mode, the thing is completely transparent. Don't believe the reviewers who talk about its "sound" - the frequency response is flat and the distortion and noise are low enough to be out of place. In "Air" mode you will get a sound effect. Many reviewers have noted that this produces some heavy shelf boost, one in the upper mids, another in the highs. I learned from Focusrite (after some tooth pulling) that it also lowers the input impedance from around 6K to 2K. With some microphones this will be noticeable. There is nothing more to report as I do not use this function. There's a small hardware flaw: the headphone amp isn't always great. It has a lot of power and a high maximum voltage, so it can effortlessly drive high-impedance studio headphones and still sound great. But it has quite high output impedance and current limit. This means there will be distortion issues with low-impedance headphones that, like some current planar designs, are inefficient. I use low end cans (30 ohms) which are very efficient and find they play loud and sound great. Note, however, that Focusrite cuts corners here. Finally, bad news. The Focusrite software is a bit of a horror show. Everything worked for me, stable, for several months there were no problems. but it's been an agonizing few days to get it working. This is simply unforgivable, especially on a Mac with a supposedly class-compliant device. At least there's a chance Focusrite will fix this nonsense in the future. I will say that their support people have been very helpful, although it's not clear what exactly made my software work properly (or what was wrong with it in the first place). Knowing what I know now, I would still buy this interface. It has some flaws, but I don't see anything else that I'd like to have. They got the industrial design and ease of use of the devices spot on and that means a lot to me. And it sounds just as good as anything else as long as you don't use the wrong headphones.