SSL 2 - THE BEST BUDGET AUDIO INTERFACE FOR GUITAR?

what's up everyone welcome to all the testing remember these Sunday way follow where I said that I was really excited about an SSL all you interface well here it is it arrived I promised I will try it out and let you guys know what I think about it so I'm gonna make a demonstration of this unit with the focus being on what I consider being important for me as a guitar player as a home recording guy and also how it compares to one of my other audio interfaces the UAD era and also my apogee ensemble that is in my main source of recording here in my office the apogee ensemble is my hub here when I'm recording in my office that's where I record everything through and when I'm out on tour or you know out traveling or whatever I can use this you add the arrow to record myself and the reason why I'm going with you ID and apogee is basically because I think their preamps are the absolute best for recording di guitar I haven't used di box in probably more than 10 years because I've been using Apogee cards and just their input pm's for guitar is just so much better than a lot of the other options that are out there you Indiana put your basically like you know expensive consumer-level audio interfaces but with the new SSL to hear this audio interface this is a little bit less expensive than the UAD arrow for instance and why am i excited about this well it's obviously because it's solid state logic you know who made all those mixing consoles solid state logic is a very reputable brand with a good reputation regarding their mixing consoles and you know the inputs and preamps of their mixing consoles so when I bought this I was just really really excited to hear how it's fair towards something like this will the preamps of this ssl be a lot burden on my you ad arrow or my opinion samba so there's three things that i consider being important for me when i look at an audio interface one of the things that i use the audio interfaces most for is to record my guitars okay so what i mean by that is that you take a cable and hook it up straight into the preamp of the audio interface this is what you call recording a DI track or a direct input of that matter it's just along as cable in the world right now i can't find the end there this recording myself in DI or direct them put on my guitar it's just a really great way of recording yourself because then you don't have to settle for an amp tone or you know anything like that you can use all of that later you can reamp using this recorded di so I like to use as little as possible in my way of recording and that's why it's so important for me that you know the preamps are the audio interfaces are good enough it's just the guitar and the cable and that's it so a couple of things that are important to me when I'm recording myself it's one clarity of your signal how well do the preamps of the audio interface translate my guitar signal into logic for instance the second most important thing would be noise levels how noisy is this thing when you record yourself how much noise will be translated into your record track this is important because when you start to react your track and if you add distortion or whatever that noise floor is gonna get elevated and it's gonna become way more apparent when you re amp and use distortion and so on so that's why it's very important to have low level noise when you're recording a guitar for instance or recording anything for that fact the first thing which is not necessarily the most important thing in the world but that is round-trip latency what latency will I get if I just plug in the guitar and monitor myself through logic for instance that's the round-trip latency how long does it take for the interface to input your signal and longer it out through Logic Pro X that's basically round-trip latency right there very important if you use plugins I want to hear yourself when you play a certain plug-in and logic and recording yourself now depending on how you monitor yourself when you record yourself having a good round trip latency is probably more important than you think so those are the three things that are important to me and those are three things I'm trying out in this video today you know I'm not used to trying out audio interfaces on my channel but I thought this was really interesting because I was genuinely interested when I bought this and if it would be something I could recommend to you guys for just recording yourself and recording guitars like the slice of this thing is really really good and there's also a SSL two + version which has a couple more extra headphone outputs it also has RCA outputs it has MIDI stuff like that but other than that still has to two channels and it's just really simple real simple phones monitor level monitor mix and then you have the two inputs right here but what caught my attention a little bit are these 4k legacy buttons right here which basically I guess it's some sort of coloring of the preamps to make it sound like the mixing consoles that SSL are making the 4000 series for instance so I guess this button will kind of mimic that covering it's gonna be really interesting seeing how it affects the tone so when I record a guitar for instance into a preamp like my you in the arrow or my ensemble I usually just hook it up into the instrument input and I don't put any gain on the track at all because basically the guitar is so loud by itself that if you use gain on your preamp you're gonna distort that signal that's the premise of what I'm doing in this video is that I keep the preamp gain on Cyril on all three units and to measure the noise floor levels I basically cranked the preamp to max and then I used a logic analyzer to analyze the noise that the unit is making for the apogee ensemble there's a little little bit of noise happening but worth mentioning is that it has a plus 75 gain range happening so it's actually louder and you can push it more than these two interfaces right here if we check the UAD arrow for instance and max out the preamp the noise levels are extremely extremely low and I'm thinking the arrow why would it be less noisy than the ensemble interface that I have and my only guess is that I think that because the uod arrow is a Thunderbolt 3 interface that gets powered by that one cable I think it just generates less noise overall while you know the Apogee Ensemble and has its own power interface and you know it goes through your power so it adds a little bit of an external power noise happening or something like that I think that is what will probably make a difference and obviously because it has you know 10 DB more gain range now if we go to the SSL and I cranked it it's extremely extremely noisy unfortunately it's in line level with a high said which I said is the it like the instrument input that you will want and it's just really really noisy I'm not sure if it's the USBC cable or connection or whatever it is but overall it's just noisy as hell as you can see it's a lot noisier than both the uod arrow and the apogee ensemble so on that point the noise on this unit is it's not acceptable unfortunately now will it matter when you to record yourself with a gain at zero if you have an environment where you have a lot of noise and you you know grounding issues in your building or whatever then it's definitely gonna matter if you're not having too many grounding issues happening you have a very low noise environment in your studio then I don't think it's gonna be a problem now how does it stack up with the round-trip latency well we're gonna find out so the upper Dion Samba why I have here is connected for a fun durable to cable and I'm getting a round-trip latency of 2.9 milliseconds in buffer size 32 okay so that's that's pretty low that's pretty low right there and with the UAD arrow I'm getting 8.5 milliseconds round-trip right there but still like a 1.3 millisecond output the you in the arrow has like a built-in processing happening in DSP where you can load in your own plugins and stuff like that onto your tracks before you record and that might be why it has a longer round-trip latency now the ssl 2 interface has a round-trip latency of seven point nine milliseconds so it's a little faster than the arrow when it comes to round-trip latency but the apogee ensemble is just on our way other level than this now depending on your monitoring situation this will matter more or less if you're using the logic plugins to record yourself you're definitely going to feel the difference between the UAD arrow 8.5 milliseconds and the apogee ensemble 2.9 millisecond round-trip latency but all in all this is very very nerdy and if you're monitoring yourself through something else while you're recording this doesn't really matter but at the end of the day I think the most important aspect for me when I'm trying out or buying an interface will be the clarity of the input preamps how good will my guitar sound through the preamp basically so I made a test I recorded a loop using this boss Loop Station right here and then I took the same signal into all of these three interfaces right here and I ended up with these four files right here so we have the ensemble signal right here then we have the arrow DSS l2 and then we have the SSL two with the 4k engage right there so we're gonna listen to them one by one I also I'll share all of these so you guys can listen to yourself and try and react them if you want but let's start with the ensemble UAD arrow SL 2 then the ssl 2 with the 4k legacy mode engaged and you might say you know I didn't hear a difference well it's because the differences are so so slight you might not hear the difference right here when you listen to an individual di track is signal but you'll hear it when you add distortion to it or a plug-in [Music] and while these are very very similar the biggest difference that I'm getting is that overall the regular SSL input signal is just slightly lower in DB than the rest while if you engage the 4k it kind of backs it up a little bit so if I compare both of these interfaces with my apogee ensemble which is sort of like that's where I record everything basically now if I compare all of these signals using a match EQ and logic it gets a lot more apparent where the differences are so if I compare my arrow to my ensemble that you can see the arrow is slightly brighter over 10-k Hertz so it is a little bit different but the difference basically like one or two DB or something like that but other than that both the uod arrow and the ensemble are really really close on how they sound when you record your input that's I think that's why I like them both because they're basically the same sounding now if you compare the ssl to in regular version versus the ensemble you can see there's a little bit of a shift happening here the ssl signal is a little bit brighter over 3000 Hertz overall the ssl interface is a tad bit brighter actually it's really a small small margin right here but it makes it a little bit different sounding it's not the same if you compare the ssl to vs my ensemble interface you get this comparison right here so it's basically the same it has a couple of differences here and there the ssl is a little bit darker upper in the upper 15,000 t but that's not something you're gonna hear and in a guitar single i mean and not necessarily something that you would need and get our single so all in all I think the inputs of the ssl is on par with both the UAD arrow and the ensemble but how does it sound if we put it on 4k mode but see the difference right here here's the regular as a sell signal and here's the 4k version and as you can see here when you engage the 4k mode it basically shifts them makes the whole input priam a little bit brighter it's like two and a half decibel up until 20 K where it goes up to almost 5 decibels plus and then a little bit less bass probably and what I'm hearing when I'm just listening back to front of these 2 di signals is that the the high end is distorting a little bit more when you engage to 4k this is not something bad it's more of a flavor of the coloring basically and if you will record a microphone maybe this would be really beneficial as well it will just brighten up your voice a little bit but for one recording guitar I don't think having those extra high ends will help I personally much more prefer when it's more of a dumbed down signal because all those high frequencies on a DI track they don't always translate well when you rehab it and this is the sound with the archetype clean engaged regular [Music] 4k that's a slight bit more output in the board game so to conclude this and also to compare this ssl to with my you at the arrow maybe it's not as well built or well enclosed the UAD arrow that's completely silent you know when I push the inputs and just check the noise I think the preamps sound almost on par ass on the U with the arrow and the apogee ensemble at the end of a I think that is what's the most important for a lot of people and for the price this is like two hundred and forty euros which is half of the UAD arrow for the price I think the preamps are absolutely kick-ass which would make sense it's a solid state logic product if the preamps would have sucked it would have been a problem but the preamps are really good and it's half the price of a UID arrow and I mean this ensemble is like two thousand something like that so you can't really compare them so would I recommend it to you as a guitar player that's out there to try and record yourself with di yes I think so I think the preamp sound better than some of the units in the same price level and maybe they have other features that this does not have but this right here is more than enough for me at least of what I'm doing and for that I think it's a pretty price for D actually so there you go hope you enjoyed this little nerdy test right there I'm happy that I tried it out I don't think it's better than the UAD arrow and the UAD arrow i'll continue use that i'm very happy with that but it is a very good competitor right there thank you so much for watching bye

Channel: Ola Englund

Views: 269,083

Rating: 4.9319592 out of 5

Keywords: Ola Englund, Solar Guitars

Id: 3bsCb6WFInw

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020