Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting the Focusrite guys at the Guitar Show in Birmingham and trying out their 2i2 4th Gen. Genuinely nice guys who are clearly very motivated by the product which is always nice to see. I checked out the Solo and the 2i2, but it's the 2i2 I'm interested in. They were offering 25% off plus some free extras if I plumped up the money on the day.
I'm still trying to figure out whether the £170 (ish) investment is worth it vs sticking with the Line6 gear I have owned for years, or picking out a cheaper modern alternative like the
ESI UX22 which is a 3rd of the price. I've never used a 2i2 3rd Gen so for me, this is my first experience with Focusrite in person, so I would have be jumping straight to 4th.
Sadly, I was really disappointing and underwhelmed although I'm not sure if the guys on the stand were setup to fail (explained next parapgraph). On a dry signal, I couldn't really hear a
massive difference sonically to the interface that I use now and that was using their Scarlett headphones which are £100 on top. It sounded fine. I really wanted this thing to blow me off my feet though, but it just sounded like a decent interface to me. Nothing spectacular. Air mode... not seeing anything there to shout home about. Despite me calling the Auto Gain function a fad (in another thread), I actually think that's a pretty good idea. Take's all of the guesswork out setting your gain up and it definitely works well. I noticed a little bit of latency that I didn't expect (more than I experience on my Toneport). I asked the chap who thought it might be the buffer settings or the VST... Kind of feels like something they should have had figured out before demoing it to the public though.
All that said I don't think their demo setup helped whatsoever. They had three of the very cheapest and poorly setup Fender Squier's you can buy, all running through a single amplifier VST with no effects in the chain and none installed that you could use. It sounded drier than a 2 year old rice cake when the VST was on. With a bit of tweaking (rolling almost all of the treble off) I was able to get something that sound just OK but you've got exhibitors littered with guitars that were £1000< to demo their kit, all kinds of cool effects pedals and amplifiers, Neural DSP literally the stand across, and the Focusrite guys were there with one of the most budget guitars you can buy and a single Marshall amp sim....
So I still remain undecided on the Focusrite. Perhaps I need to use one for a few days or something... I will happily buy one, if it's going to give me a marked improvement over my current interface, but I've just not seen that it will yet.