Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 4th Gen – USB Audio Interface Review (new AIR mode!!)

focusrite just released the fourth generation of scarlet interfaces and I had a look at the 4i4 which has a couple of new features and allegedly an improved audio performance so without further Ado let's check it out hey Julian cross here and in this video we are going to have a look at the focusrite Scarlet 4i4 in the fourth generation quick disclaimer focusrite did send me the interface prior to release in return for an honest review and because of that I'm labeling this video as an advertisement but as always everything I say in this video is my own and honest opinion and focusrite has no say in the making of this video they don't even get to see the video before it's released alright let's have a look at the interface and then dive into the audio quality the first thing that sticks out compared to the third generation is that there's a new set of buttons in the middle of the interface Behind these buttons hide a few functions a couple of them are also present in the third generation but a few of them are new in the 4th gen these are a new type of air mode an auto Game feature and a safe mode which in to avoid clipping and of course we will have a look at these features in more detail later in the video besides that you can toggle phantom power for your mic inputs and also switch the line inputs to instrument inputs all that can be done for both front inputs separately by choosing the Channel with the select button I personally would have liked to see individual phantom power and air mode indicator lights as it is you can only see the current status of one channel and if you want to see the other one you have to switch to it with the select button not a huge deal but a dedicated indicator LED for each input would have been nice speaking of inputs on the front you get two XLR and TRS combo inputs and both of them have their own gain control as the name 4i4 implies you also have two more inputs on the back which I'll get to in a second on the front you get a big volume knob to adjust the volume of the main outputs and further to the right you have a separate headphone volume control and the corresponding quarter inch headphone jack below it one thing you might have also noticed is the integrated level meter around each gain dial and the output dial with which you can see your levels at real time on the third generation this was purely an LED which indicated rough levels with a different colors but this time we have a full level meter surrounding the knobs showing you your input and also your output levels which I think is quite nice so just by having a quick glance at the front of your interface you can easily see where all your levels are switching to the back you got here remaining two inputs three and four and these are balanced quarter inch DRS line inputs these are a bit more limited compared to the front inputs in that they can only accept line levels you cannot directly connect microphones or electric guitars to these besides that you also get four outputs also quarter inch TRS connections these outputs can be used to send audio to your studio monitors or other artboard gear and you can even set up separate mixes for them but I will get to that when we have a look at the software a little later in the video one thing I noticed is that the volume knob on the front only controls output 1 and 2. not sure if it's possible but I think it would be great to have an option in the software that allows the dial to also control the output 3 and 4 which would be really handy in a dual studio monitor setup if there will be such an update I will let you know in a pinned comment below so have a look at that and while you're down there consider hitting that like And subscribe button that's always much appreciated with the fourth gen 4 I4 you also get a midi in and midi output and most importantly a highly secure Kensington locking Point connecting the interface to your PC is done via USBC with the included USBC to C or USBC to type a cable in case you use USB 2.0 or use a mobile device which does not provide enough power via the connection there is a power supply included which provides 5 volts via a separate USBC connection generally speaking if you connect the interface to a USBC port on your PC you might not need the additional power supply but if your connection does not provide enough power you will notice that in the interface face blinks red and simply won't start up and in that case you will need to use a separate power brick quick look inside as this sets the stage for what is about to come for the analog to digital conversion the 4i4 uses a set of Cirrus logic cs5381 converters which have really great specs and for the digital to analog conversion you can find three series logic cs43198 and they have an excellent specification as well and I guess we'll see how their performance is utilized in the 4th Gen 4 I4 I also like the attention to detail the Prem section is completely shielded and the housing is also acting as a shield as the screws deliberately connected to the PCB I think the build quality is really quite nice and the housing is made out of a red solid chunk of metal and all the buttons and knobs operate smoothly I also really like that the dials are spaced far enough apart so that you're not getting your fingers stuck between things like the headphone jack and the volume dials very nice time to have a look at the audio quality and we'll start with the mic inputs the frequency response should be as flat as possible which is important for a neutral sound in the lower frequencies there is some minor amount of roll-off but the drop of 1.5 DB at 20 Hertz is hardly audible especially with Dynamic microphones where you might need the maximum amount of gain if you use less gain which is often the case with condenser microphones the frequency response improves a bit in the lower frequencies and is now pretty much completely flat in the order of a range all perfectly fine no complaints here now the frequency response does of course change when you activate air mode air mode essentially increases the higher frequencies to give your recording a bit more of an Airy sound who would have thought what's new with the fourth generation is that you have two versions of the air mode available and that's presence and presence plus drive as the name implies presence will give you high frequencies a slight boost and presence plus Drive will boost your highs but also introduce uses some amount of saturation and I'll show you what that means in a second with presence activated and yes I just turned it on so you can hear what it sounds like you can see a rise towards the higher frequencies which noticeably boosts the presence range by about 4 decibels besides the obvious impact on the frequency response the presence mode does not have any further impact on your sound so it really is quite similar to an EQ adjustment which you can quickly engage if you want it to have a brighter sounding recording now I switched over to the presence plus drive setting and you should hear a significant change in sound which is also reflected in the frequency response what this setting is doing is essentially giving you a v-shaped frequency response it's boosting the low end cutting the mids and also boosting the high frequencies significantly this is often referred to as the radio Sound and if you like it or not a very common EQ curve for vocals but I have to confess it is quite aggressive with its 6 DB boost in the higher frequencies and one word of caution these effects are applied directly to the sound of your recording and you cannot undo them in post so make sure that this is the sound that you want to go for one thing I quite like is that the drive gives you additional let's call it texture in your Sound by emulating analog equipment you can very easily see that when we have a look at the Distortion graph in blue this is the Distortion performance with the ammo turned off and as you can see it's a descending line with just a very small rise close to clipping and this is a very excellent performance meaning that under normal recording situations you will not encounter any audible Distortion if we have a look at the green line here the air mode with present setting was turned on and it's fairly similar setting just slightly above the Blue Line because it has a bit more noise due to the high frequency boost but overall also shows minimal amounts of distortion this is in complete contrast to the presence plus drive setting where you can see that the Orange Line starts to shoot off towards the top and this is an indicator that Distortion is rising with signal level so the stronger the signal level the more saturation you will get this is pretty cool to see because this kind of mimics analog equipment and the added saturation can give your recordings a bit more grit for the lack of a better word let me know if you want to hear some more audio samples I might make a video comparing the new Air mode with some competing emulation modes like the ssl's 4K or UA volts vintage mode but for now let's focus on Focus right Right Alright as always I measured the preamp noise of the 4i4 and it came in at -127.2 dbua weighted technically speaking this is 1 DB worse than the third generation Scarlet series and I think that's because of the digitally controlled preamp but to be honest it won't be different in practice is really not that audible as you can see in the comparison the preamp noise of the 4i4 is still quite low and here's how a few of well-known interfaces compare audibly all recordings have been boosted by the same amount so you can hear the noise more clearly currently I'm also speaking into an sm7b which is very well known for its low output and this accentuates the premium noise this mic is directly connected to the 4i4 and this is about the noise law that you can expect from this setup if you listen with headphones I think you can barely make out the noise but it's mostly the sm7b that's to blame for this for this challenging microphone the noise floor is still quite low and overall that's a good preamp noise performance and yes that also means that there's hardly any need for a cloud head or head lifter or the like one more reason for this is that the interface has a nice amount of gain which makes it easy to amplify even low output microphones to a proper recording level as you can see from the graph the fourth gen 4 I4 has it on average 5 DB more gain than the third generation Scarlet interfaces besides preamp noise dynamic range is also important actually much more important with condenser microphones because they have a stronger signal level than Dynamic microphones and you want to leave yourself some Headroom while recording without introducing additional noise for that you want to have the highest amount of dynamic range possible and here the 4i4 comes in with 115.5 DBA that's once again an improvement of about 5 DB over the previous generation and the performance wise pretty much identical to something like a moto M2 which in my measurements has always performed well in practice 115 DB dynamic range is excellent and there will hardly be any scenarios where you would ever need more let's take a look at the line inputs one thing I noticed is that the real line inputs have an Ever So slight and better performance than the frontal ones the frequency response of the rear inputs is slightly flatter and that's likely because the front inputs run through a preamp section and they are controllable via the gain knobs that said both responses are incredibly flat and there will be no audible difference between the two in terms of frequency response the difference does continue though for the aforementioned reason if we have a look at the Distortion performance the front inputs here in red have a rise in Distortion towards the clipping point but this is still pretty low Distortion and when you record with a typical level around -15 dbfs the distortions don't even come into play so while there is a difference between the two I would say it's impossible to tell the area and front inputs apart audibly but purely from a technical perspective the rear inputs are ever so slightly better dynamic range on the front and rear is the same though and it's pretty much identical to the mic input with 115 DBA and as mentioned before this is an excellent performance the output side also has been improved so let's check out the main outputs their frequency response is essentially a flat line across the chart and it doesn't get much better than that dynamic range is extremely good with 121.8 DB which is right up there with more expensive interfaces with that much dynamic range it's pretty much guaranteed that you will not hear any noise from the main outputs which is really great to see in terms of distortion I also have great news if you look at the graph you can see a steadily descending line and Distortion sits as low as -115 DB which is most definitely inaudible the 4i4 also delivers a decent maximum output level and this way you should have no problems driving your studio monitors to allow levels all in all an excellent output performance and in my opinion the measurements show that the output quality is transparent meaning the only thing that you will hear from these outputs is the playback audio without any audible Distortion or noise this is exactly what I want to see from audio interfaces these days so great job folks right one bigger point of critique in my third generation scarletted reviews has always been the amount of distortion and slight lack of power of the headphone output focusrite claims to have listened and improved in the fourth generation in these aspects let's see how that turned out if you're watching this on your phone you probably just see a blob of colors but trust me there's a lot of data in here I just want to Crime it all on one screen for you to make a comparison but let's hop into the most interesting measurements frequency response I'm just showing here for completeness as mentioned I expect this to be flat these days and the 4a4 does a very great job with this next thing is output impedance this is important because if this is too high it can negatively impact the sound here the 4i4 comes in at about 10 ohm which is not great but also not terrible if you use low impedance headphones typically around 32 ohms there might be a chance that the sound is ever so slightly impacted it's not the end of the world but if accuracy is important for you I would advise to use higher impedance headphones with 80 ohms or above Now power output is where things become interesting because here you can see that regardless of the headphone and pins connected the outputs can produce a decent amount of power while this might still not be enough for some esoteric headphones I think that most headphones will get loud enough with this amount of output power that said I would have liked to see an even higher amount of power output to be certain that you have enough power especially because the interface does come with a power adapter and competing interfaces like the audient ID Series has noticeably more output so while this has definitely been an improvement over the previous generation I think this still a bit of room to grow Distortion was where the previous generation had some issues especially when you use low impedance headphones as you can see this is completely resolved with the new generation and the THD plus n numbers are great for the data efficient others here here are the detailed THD plus and versus Power graphs one thing to note is that in the lower frequencies the Distortion still rises a bit but I would argue that this is still inaudible so don't worry about it and noise is also slightly improved with very sensitive iems you might still hear some slight hiss but with normal over ear headphones there's virtually no chance that you will hear any noise from your headphones okay okay lots of numbers and graphs let's hop over into the focusrite control 2 software and I'll show you what kind of things you can do there here you got the input section and this is where you have full control over the four inputs of the 4i4 you can see the audio level of all four channels and for the first two you have quite a few more functions available for example you can set the gain or of the inputs in the software without needing to reach for the interface then there is the aforementioned Auto gain feature which records a 10 second segment of your audio and then sets the gain accordingly this can be quite helpful when you're just starting out and you're unsure where to set your game yourself or if you want the interface to take over and set the gain for both inputs simultaneously and you can do that by linking both channels linking the channels is also super helpful for stereo recording because then the gain of input 1 and 2 are coupled together like on the interface itself you can also toggle phantom power and instrument online mode individually in the software air mode can also be controlled via the software and here you can select between presence and presence plus drive mode save mode is of course also available here when enabled if there is any peak in your audio the preamp is adjusted down automatically so that the audio is still captured the important part is that this does not work like a limiter after the gain is turned down it is not turned back up again on the plus side this does indeed effectively prevent clipping by quickly adjusting the gain but if you have a loud Peak then the safe mode would turn down the gain to compensate and then all audio after that is recorded at a lower gain setting so as a safe mode suggests it is more of a last resort type of thing that would adjust the gain for you in the rare case that you would clip but this doesn't give you any excuse to not set your gain correctly if it's possible to have a limiter function in the future I would be really happy folks right you know what to do one more thing to mention is that some features are not available with the highest sample rates and that's primarily the drive setting in the air mode and the save mode so if you're wondering why they are grayed out now you know why I was also a bit confused by this luckily full mixing and routing functionality is available now at the highest sample rates speaking of mixing in the mixer tab you can see that you have a three fully customizable mixers available able this means that you can for example have one mix for your monitor outputs a separate mix for your headphones and another one for loopback and yes the interface does support loopback as well just one suggestion here for focusrite would be great to have a way of saving and loading our mix settings so you can quickly toggle between your most common setups by the way all this mixing functionality is the reason you don't find any direct monitoring button on the interface as you can create a fully custom mix for your headphones which can also include audio from your inputs because the whole mixing is done digitally I checked if you can hear any delay the direct monitoring latency depends on the set sample rate but it was always below 0.5 milliseconds and I think it's safe to say that this amount of delay is inaudible while we are on the topic of delay let's have a quick look at the round trip latency which is the time it takes a signal to get recorded and then play it back again this is important if you want to apply effects to your audio that you are recording and monitoring it in real of time for example in Epson here the 4r4 performs quite well at all sample rates although the performance does improve with higher sample rates so if every millisecond is important for you I would suggest you stick to those and if you turn off safe mode in the control panel you can even shave off about one more millisecond at the risk of crackling audio it's also great to see that the driver reports the correct amount of latency to your door because this way you know that when you turn on delay compensation things will match up properly I want to be open with you in my testing phase I did encounter the one or other bug in the software which truth be told is really not that uncommon in the pre-production stage and I have to hand it to focus right because they updated the software and firmware multiple times already and fixed nearly all the stuff that I encountered I'm confident that they keep improving the software and I have the feeling that they take the performance and ease of use of the software quite seriously and I think that's really great to see to close out this video Let's Go through the pros and cons I could observe with the 4i4 on the plus side the audio performance has been improved pretty much all around and I like the slightly improved form factor which gives you easy access to all buttons and knobs the 4x4 in the fourth generation also has a couple of new features like air mode safe mode and auto gain which might come in handy for you I also like that the software offers you to control the majority of settings of the interface without needing to reach for the interface simultaneously I also think that it's great that with the exception of direct monitoring you can toggle all features on the 4a4 itself without the need to go into the software I would have liked to see an individual indicator for phantom power air mode and so on as you only can see the status of one currently selected channel the real line inputs don't have any gain setting and also features like the air mode are not available for these inputs so only the front two inputs give you the full experience with the rear inputs being more of an added bonus I guess a second headphone output would have been also quite nice although I'm not sure how many people would really use that and the last thing to mention is that the 4i4 does not have any digital in or outputs to further enhance the number of channels which I think can be a big deciding factor all in all I think the 404 is a very solid interface space which brings a couple of new features and very welcome performance improvements the audio quality is excellent and in the only question that remains is how does it compare to the 4th gen 2i2 and solo if you're curious subscribe as I will be testing them next please give this video a thumbs up and as always I will see you in the next one

Channel: Julian Krause

Views: 163,225

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Id: ujTcpgg5PuU

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023