Focusrite Clarett 2Pre USB - REVIEW (audio performance tested)

the focusrite claret 2 pre usb is what i would call a mid-range audio interface and this brings two questions is it worth the extra money over for example the focusrite scarlett series and how does the claret perform anyways well we're going to find out hey julian krause here and before we dive deeper into my audio quality measurements let's have a closer look at the hardware side of the clevret 2 pre and all the features that it provides starting on the front you can find two xlr and trs combo inputs to plug in microphones line level devices and instruments like an electric guitar for each channel you can find a gain control and a button which lets you toggle the phantom power for each channel individually the two pre also get two leds to indicate the status of the microphone and air mode the instrument mode switches the trs input from a line level to an instrument input the air mode is designed to add a coloration to your sound which emulates the original focusrite isa preamps more about that a little later in the video on the front of the 2pre you can also find a big monitor knob which lets you control the outputs on the back further to the right the 23 got three indicator leds one which shows the power status one indicates the usb connection and the third one indicates whether the internal clock of the two pre is locked which ensures a precise timing and eliminates drift when working with multiple digital audio devices you also get a knob to control the headphone volume and a corresponding quarter inch connection right below it on the back of the 2pre you will find a 12 volt dc input which is used to power the interface the needed power supply is included in the box i personally quite like that there is a power switch on the 2 pre as this allows you to turn off the interface completely without needing to unplug the power supply to connect the interface to a pc the 2pr features a usb type-c connector the 23 also features an optical input which can extend the amount of inputs by 8 at a sample rate of 44.1 or 48 kilohertz or 4 more inputs at 88.2 and 96 kilohertz the 2 pre accepts adat and spdif making the 23 essentially a 10 channel interface at least for the input side with a 2pre you also get a midi in and a midi output and the connection that looks suspiciously like a second usbc connection is actually a kensington locking point lastly on the far right you can find two sets of balanced trs line level outputs the build quality of the claret 23 is really quite good the housing is mostly out of metal except for the back which is out of plastic all the knobs feel solid and turn smoothly and i like that all the controls are easy to reach and they don't get in the way of each other the nice build quality actually manifests itself even more when we have a look inside the 2 pre as said before the back is out of plastic but focusrite placed a metal shield on the inside which is grounded with a small metal spring that presses against it inside you can find a double-sided pcb with a usb controller on the top and further components like ad and da converters on the bottom for the analog to digital conversion the claret 2 pre uses the ak-5388a eq and the ak-5513eq for the digital to analog conversion which are high performance chips and this makes it even more exciting to see if the claret fully utilizes this potential by the way if you're interested my patrons get access to even more detailed pictures of the inside of the two pre ok so all in all the build quality is very good inside and out a quick look at the driver with the focusrite control you can remotely control the instrument and line level switch and activate the air mode on the output side you can set up different routing options which brings quite a bit of flexibility and you can customize the output to hear exactly what you want from the interface one thing i notice is that the output routing options are not available if you use the interface with a sample rate of 192 kilohertz in order to use the routing you have to use the interface with a sample rate of 96 kilohertz or lower just something to be aware of because the routing is realized in the digital domain there is also some amount of delay in the monitoring signal which is affected by the sample rate i measured the delay and as you can see it's negligibly low so it's still safe to say that the direct monitoring is real time okay let's dive a bit deeper into the specifications of the claret 2 pre and check out the audio quality the claret 23 has a maximum sample rate of 192 kilohertz and this means that it should be able to record a wide range of frequencies even above the human hearing range i measured the frequency response of the microphone input which of course should be as flat as possible as you can see at the maximum gain setting the response extends all the way above 80 000 hertz which is well above the human hearing range up to 20 000 hertz which marks the upper limit of human hearing the response is very flat and only drops off slightly above this point that's very good on the other end of the scale things look slightly worse here the response is down by about 1.5 decibels at 20 hertz while i highly doubt that you will ever notice that the response could have arguably been slightly better now this changes when the gain is set to about half in this case the response is extremely flat all the way from 10 hertz to 80 000 hertz and that's exactly what you want to see of course i also checked the distortion behavior of the microphone input and measured the total harmonic distortion plus noise with a typical microphone level signal the claret comes in at -98 decibels which is very good the thd plus one versus amplitude graph confirms this performance and the continually descending line which sits low on the graph indicates that the distortion components are negligibly low another important spec of the microphone input is the dynamic range the dynamic range is the difference between the strongest signal the interface can capture in comparison to its noise floor of course you want to have the highest dynamic range possible because this way you can leave yourself more headroom while recording and can amplify the recording a bit in post without introducing any additional noise focusrite estates the dynamic range of the two pre with an astonishingly high dynamic range of 119 dba of course i had to verify this claim and what do you know my unit came in with a dynamic range of 119.2 dba weighted that's a huge amount of dynamic range and rightfully places the claret 2 pre at the top of my chart with the best performance that i measured so far okay let's check out the pre and performance of the clovered 2 pre usb for that i'm speaking into a shure sm7b and this is pretty much a worst case scenario as the sm7b only delivers a miniscule signal which has to be amplified a lot by the 2 pre let me be quiet for a second so you can never listen to the noise law of this setup as you could hear the noise flow is very low and that's because the preamps in the claret 2 3 have an equivalent input noise of -128.8 dbua weighted the ein lets you directly compare the noise of different preamps in different interfaces and you can see that the 2pre performs very well the performance of the 2pre is on par with the moto m2 and even a tiny bit better than the scarlet 2i2 this also means in terms of noise performance that you don't need a cloud lifter or a fat head with the claret 2 pre but i did notice that the 2 pre has a relatively low maximum system gain of around 41 decibels this means that with very insensitive marks like the sm7b you will most likely have to max out your gain and the signal level is still a bit on the lower side this is usually not a big deal because of the high dynamic range you can simply boost the audio in post but if for some reason you need more gain and a digital gain is not an option a cloud lifter or fathead can help you out now while you're listening to the sm7b let me quickly turn on the air mode so you can get a feeling of what it does to this sound now i engaged the air mode and you can instantly hear that the sound is more well airy and the 2pre does 3 things to achieve this first of all it physically changes the input impedance of the mic input when you engage the air mode you will hear a click inside the 2pre which switches over the impedance this changes the input impedance from around 6 to 2 kilo ohms and this can have an effect on the frequency response of a microphone especially dynamic microphone which in turn changes the sound though i would have expected the impedance to be even lower in the air mode as 2 kilo ohms is still relatively high and thus the effect on the sound is quite small i also compared the distortion with the air mode turned on and off and even though there is an obvious change in the measurements the distortion components with the air mode turned on are still very low and i highly doubt that you will ever hear them so the biggest difference with the air mode actually comes from a change in frequency response here you can see a comparison of the response with the air mode turned on and off with the air mod off the response is very flat and with the air mode engaged the response rises by about two decibels towards one kilohertz and above that even rises up to four decibels which gives a very audible boost to the higher frequencies by the way if you don't have an interface that has the air mode you can imitate this response with an equalizer i've made a video about that and i will link it in the description so the air mode is an artistic control that can give your audio a boost in clarity which might come in handy for some of you enough about the mic inputs let's have a small look at the line level inputs of the two pre the frequency response is extremely flat all the way from 10 hertz to 80 kilohertz which is exactly what you want to see the thd plus n versus amplitude is also very good showing a line that sits low on the graph and also has a steady descent only very close to clipping the distortion rises aggressively so don't let your audio level hit very close to 0 dbfs in practice when your level will be around -18 to -12 dbfs you get an excellent performance with inaudible levels of distortion and noise and the dynamic range of the line level input is excellent as well with 118.5 dba weighted so all in all the line level inputs are really really good it's time to take a look at the outputs of the claret2 pre and we'll start with the main out here is the frequency response of the main output which is essentially perfect because in the audible range it is a straight line across the graph the response extends out even further and is flat from 10 hertz to 40 000 hertz the claret2pre continues its excellent performance in the distortion test at the maximum output the 2pre delivers a nice and strong signal with 16dbv and the distortion plus noise is only -102.4 decibels when i sweep the thd plus n versus amplitude you can see that the two pre performs extremely well in the graph you can even make out a slight bump which is where my audio analyzer switches its ranges that means that the two pre performs so well that the measurement actually starts to get limited by the performance of my measurement equipment so i think this goes without saying but the main outs of the two pre-deliver transparent audio performance with distortions and noise levels well below the level of audibility that's really nice of course this wouldn't be a complete review without the test of the headphone output performance of the clevret 2 pre usb as always i made a bunch of measurements and put them into my standard table which lets you directly compare all the measured interfaces and the colors indicate how an interface performs at a particular measurement let's start out with the frequency response and as you can see the 2p performs very well in this regard with a deviation in the audible range of only 0.5 decibels if we have a look at the response you can see that it is very flat and the drop-off of half a db is just at the upper limit of human hearing this amount of deviation is inaudible and this makes this a very good response the output impedance of 5 ohm is pretty good as well yes it still could have been a bit lower to ensure that the frequency response stays flat regardless which type of headphone you use but for the most part 5 ohm is good enough what's nice to see is that the claret takes advantage of its external power supply and provides a high amount of power this means that regardless if you use low or high impedance headphones the 2p will drive them to very loud listening levels the next measurement is a bit of a negative surprise up to this point the 2 pre has performed very well in all my measurements and all of a sudden we get a measurement with a very high amount of distortion with high impedance headphones the distortion levels are very good but with low impedance headphones the performance is pretty bad if we have a look at the thd plus n versus amplitude graph you can see that with a load of 32 ohms the distortion of the headphone output rises aggressively above 100 microwatt and levels of around -50 db compared to the 300 ohm load this is noticeably worse and it will lead to audible distortion interestingly i have seen this exact behavior before and that's actually with the focusrite scarlett series back when i reviewed the third generation scarlet 2i2 and the solo they showed the exact same behavior although they didn't nearly deliver as much power as the claret does if we check out the thd plus n over the frequency range for the 2 pre you can see that with high impedance headphones the noise and distortion is very low and well behaved but the curve with a 32 ohm load shows a steady rise towards the higher frequencies and around 5 to 6 kilohertz even crosses the minus 40 db line that's over one percent of distortion which is far from great so if you use the clever 2 3 i highly recommend to use headphones with at least 80 ohms and above to keep distortions to an inaudible level i also measured the noise of the headphone output and regardless if you have the gain set to the minimum or at a typical listening level the noise is very low the channel balance with 1.3 db is okay meaning that when you have your headphones at a low listening level the left and right side of your headphones will still be equally loud and the last measurement is the crossover which is actually not that great this comes back to the distortion problem earlier with the high crosstalk figure audio from the right channel will leak into the left one and vice versa and in my tests i've seen that because of the high crosstalk this torsion can be introduced from one channel to the other again this isn't so much a problem with high impedance headphones but this underlines the statement to not use low impedance headphones with the claret 2 pre for critical listening last but not least i want to show you my measured round-trip latencies which of course should be as low as possible to not perceive any delay when for example using virtual instruments or an ampsim these are the times i got with a sample rate of 48 kilohertz and different buffer sizes and here are the times for 192 kilohertz please keep in mind that the rtl is heavily affected by the sample rate and buffer size and which combination you choose depends on your pc and the current project you're working on okay so what do i think of the focusrite cleret 2 pre-usb i think it's a very capable audio interface which has a solid build quality and delivers an excellent audio performance the microphone inputs have a very low noise preamp and a very high dynamic range the line level inputs can take a proper professional line level and show extremely low levels of noise and distortion and the main outs deliver a transparent audio quality this excellent performance is only overshadowed a bit by the weak performance of the headphone output with low beams headphones the 2 pre shows an audible amount of distortion which for the price is a big no-go on the plus side if you use high impedance headphones the claret delivers a very good performance and it also has plenty of power which enables you to drive even more demanding headphones with ease all in all the claretti 2 pre is a step up from the scarlet series and brings more professional features like for example output routing if you're looking for an interface that delivers an excellent recording quality is expandable via the digital input and has additional features like the air mode the focusrite claret 2 pre usb is a very good choice just make sure to use high impedance headphones for critical listening please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel this really helps me out i will see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Julian Krause

Views: 66,934

Rating: 4.9406714 out of 5

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Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020