Let me begin by praising the overall design and construction of the interface, it looks and feels great in my studio and I am quite happy with the digital to analog converters and how music sounds through my monitors when connected to this unit. It sounds absolutely great to be honest and a huge improvement over my previous interface as far as played-back sound quality goes. Where this interface completely fails is in the strength, or should I say lack of strength, of it's microphone preamps. Julian Krause, a German YouTuber who many of you are likely familiar with, tested the Focusrite Clarett+ 2Pre – which I assume has the same preamps as the 4Pre – and found it to have the weakest microphone preamps out of every other of the many audio interface he has tested and reviewed. This is absurd considering the otherwise extremely high quality of this interface.
Why Focusrite would give us one of the best, and simultaneously worst, interfaces is beyond my understanding. I'm sure if you're recording with condenser mics you will be just fine with the amount of gain provided by the 4Pre, but my main mic is an Electro-Voice RE-20 which requires a great deal of gain and even with the addition of a Triton Audio Fethead Germanium which provides an additional +29dB of gain, I have to dial the gain on the interface up close to 3pm just to get a decent signal, which also raises the noise floor to unacceptable levels.
The Focusrite Clarett+ 4Pre is 100% incapable of driving my gain-hungry dynamic microphone without adding a ton of noise, and it just sounds awful. And yet with the Air mode on it simultaneously sounds great! Yeah, the Air mode is like a superpower of this interface, it makes vocals sound amazing. But the noise is extremely frustrating and until I am able to afford an additional outboard preamp I cannot record decent audio with my microphone through this interface.
Well maybe it's for the best because now I'm in the market for a Neve or Neve-style 1073 preamp which I believe will have a beneficial impact on the sound of my voice, and I have as my foundation the very clean AD/DA conversion the interface provides. But for now I will not be recording through the 4Pre, which was half the reason I bought it in the first place. Anyhow, hopefully this review gives a balancing perspective on the otherwise truly excellent Focusrite Clarett+ 4Pre audio interface. Cheers and keep making great sound!
