alessandroarzilli
Well-Known Member
Hello everybody! I recently switched from an old M-Track MKII to a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and as soon as I played few notes recording through (using Reaper/Win10) it I could immediately hear the overall clarity of sound has improved a lot.
First Impressions:
Bought it from Amazon (around 120,00 euros) and came home in few days. So it's the 2nd generation of Scarletts meaning it has more room in the gain stage (1st Gens used to clip even at 0 gain when playing with very high output pickups). It's a 2-inputs 2-outputs USB audio soundcard that can record up to 24-bits 192KHz and it comes with some software bundled such as Ableton Live Lite, Pro Tools First, Addictive keys and Softube to name some. I'm going to use it for heavy metal guitars to track, maybe I won't use all of the software included. At first glance it's very stylish, claassy red USB cable and outer shield.
Description:
On the front panel it has 2 input preamps and they both have a gain knob and can host a jack or an XLR cable at Line or Instrument impedance. On the right side there are the Phantom +48V power and the Direct Monitoring switches, and also the Headphones and Main Volume knobs.
On the rear panel there's the Kensington Security slot (did any of you ever use one? I didn't) and the USB port and the two mono outputs, obviously for a Left and Right speaker.
Driver download and installation:
First of all I needed to register to the Focusrite site and in my account's page I managed to download the latest Windows 10 drivers (4.36.5-612). Installed in 2 seconds just by double clicking the .exe file and clicking Ok a bunch of times, as usual. Same thing for all the bundled software applications, downloaded and installed smoothly. Now I connected the soundcard to my PC, rebooted it and waited for the system to finish loading.
Reaper setup (ASIO sample rate and buffer size):
Opened Reaper, but it didn't work correctly, because I needed to configure it to use the new Scarlett and its new drivers that I just installed, so I went to Options -> Preferences (shortcut is Control + P) and under the Device tab I had to change the drivers from my old ASIO4ALL to the new Focusrite USB ASIO. Clicking on the ASIO Configuration button it loads up the ASIO Control Panel: the main goal is to have the lowest latency possible (in Reaper you can see it on the top right corner of the program's main window, under the X button). I managed to get only 6 milliseconds of latency setting the ASIO buffer to 128 and the recording sample rate to 48.000Hz. Maybe I could tweak it a little bit more, but I'm comfortable playing like this.
Conclusions:
I can totally hear differences between DI tracks recorded with my brand new Scarlett and my old M-Track MKII. I'm going to make a full comparison on this topic next, as soon as I have some free time from work. Anyway I believe that it's a great product, very strong, with very good preamp sections and a nice look! These are just my personal opinions on this red soundcard, I'm neither sponsored by Focusrite nor endorsed in any way by other brands, I just like to make video reviews related to metal and I hope the community will like my content, too. I'm also providing some pictures I took with my own camera, sorry if they're not professionally colour-graded, I'm learning more and more every time I edit videos.
Also, if anybody is interested, I made an Unboxing/Review/Setup video that can be found on my YouTube channel, at the end of which I play riffs with my Solar A2.6W using free plugins (STL Ignite Emissary Bundle).
Thanks for reading my review, hope you enjoyed what I wrote.
First Impressions:
Bought it from Amazon (around 120,00 euros) and came home in few days. So it's the 2nd generation of Scarletts meaning it has more room in the gain stage (1st Gens used to clip even at 0 gain when playing with very high output pickups). It's a 2-inputs 2-outputs USB audio soundcard that can record up to 24-bits 192KHz and it comes with some software bundled such as Ableton Live Lite, Pro Tools First, Addictive keys and Softube to name some. I'm going to use it for heavy metal guitars to track, maybe I won't use all of the software included. At first glance it's very stylish, claassy red USB cable and outer shield.
Description:
On the front panel it has 2 input preamps and they both have a gain knob and can host a jack or an XLR cable at Line or Instrument impedance. On the right side there are the Phantom +48V power and the Direct Monitoring switches, and also the Headphones and Main Volume knobs.
On the rear panel there's the Kensington Security slot (did any of you ever use one? I didn't) and the USB port and the two mono outputs, obviously for a Left and Right speaker.
Driver download and installation:
First of all I needed to register to the Focusrite site and in my account's page I managed to download the latest Windows 10 drivers (4.36.5-612). Installed in 2 seconds just by double clicking the .exe file and clicking Ok a bunch of times, as usual. Same thing for all the bundled software applications, downloaded and installed smoothly. Now I connected the soundcard to my PC, rebooted it and waited for the system to finish loading.
Reaper setup (ASIO sample rate and buffer size):
Opened Reaper, but it didn't work correctly, because I needed to configure it to use the new Scarlett and its new drivers that I just installed, so I went to Options -> Preferences (shortcut is Control + P) and under the Device tab I had to change the drivers from my old ASIO4ALL to the new Focusrite USB ASIO. Clicking on the ASIO Configuration button it loads up the ASIO Control Panel: the main goal is to have the lowest latency possible (in Reaper you can see it on the top right corner of the program's main window, under the X button). I managed to get only 6 milliseconds of latency setting the ASIO buffer to 128 and the recording sample rate to 48.000Hz. Maybe I could tweak it a little bit more, but I'm comfortable playing like this.
Conclusions:
I can totally hear differences between DI tracks recorded with my brand new Scarlett and my old M-Track MKII. I'm going to make a full comparison on this topic next, as soon as I have some free time from work. Anyway I believe that it's a great product, very strong, with very good preamp sections and a nice look! These are just my personal opinions on this red soundcard, I'm neither sponsored by Focusrite nor endorsed in any way by other brands, I just like to make video reviews related to metal and I hope the community will like my content, too. I'm also providing some pictures I took with my own camera, sorry if they're not professionally colour-graded, I'm learning more and more every time I edit videos.
Also, if anybody is interested, I made an Unboxing/Review/Setup video that can be found on my YouTube channel, at the end of which I play riffs with my Solar A2.6W using free plugins (STL Ignite Emissary Bundle).
Thanks for reading my review, hope you enjoyed what I wrote.
