We’re into day 2 of the Prime Big Deal Days and my top-rated audio interface just got a healthy discount with a cool $40 knocked off the regular price taking it well below the $200 mark. It’s undoubtedly the best Prime Day music deal I’ve seen on an audio interface so far, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be around much longer with the sale set to end at midnight on October 8th.
Over the last three years or so I’ve reviewed more audio interfaces than I care to remember. It’s part of my job, as I look after the audio interface guides here at MusicRadar, and when I’m not testing budget audio interfaces in my home studio, I’m using pro-grade ones in a proper analogue studio alongside a console.
So safe to say, I know what’s required of an interface in either situation, and when I was compiling our guide, out of all the interfaces I tested the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 4th Gen came out as the best. It’s not just because of the audio performance, though. In fact, in my opinion the audio quality is so high amongst consumer interfaces now that for us mere mortals who aren’t working in million-dollar studios, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference.
If not audio quality, then why did I pick the 2i2 for the number 1 spot? Well, what I found when using the Scarlett 2i2 4th Gen was that it was not only easy to use, but it had a massive depth of functionality that made it suitable for more than just beginners. It’s pretty much plug and play on Windows, with the additional Focusrite Control 2 software taking care of any driver installation and firmware updates for you.
On Mac you can just plug it in and not even bother with the software, but that does mean you don’t get the use of remote functions like changing the input, adjusting the gain, and other core functions for tracking. You can even control it with your phone or tablet, making it a great way of adjusting if you need to go move a microphone or adjust a sound.
Add in the physical buttons on the front that can prevent clipping, automatically sort your input gain, or add a touch of high end frequencies to sweeten the signal coming in, and you've got an incredibly versatile unit that will easily handle anything you can throw at it in a home studio setting.
When I was compiling our guide I also performed latency testing on every single one of the audio interfaces, and of course, the 2i2 4th Gen came in top of the pile. It delivered an astonishing 5.782ms response time at a buffer size of 16 samples, and that’s without installing the codeless kernel extension for Mac which can lower the latency even further.
Why is this important? Well, when you’re playing your instrument into an audio interface, any latency results in a delay between you fingering a note or pressing a key and the sound you hear returning from your studio monitors or studio headphones. This can be really jarring and in my experience, anything over 10ms of latency can really throw your performance. Getting this latency down as low as possible is one of the secret ingredients to getting good quality recordings, and the Scarlett (alongside a good laptop or PC) delivers.
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