- Pro: Probably great for use with laptops.
- Pro: Served me well when I used headphones only.
- Con: Had noise related to it being USB powered.
- Con: USB connectivity died after a rapid power cycle.
This was my first external audio interface, and allowed me to get lower latency while playing piano, than I got via ASIO4ALL, and allowed me to hook up some nicer microphones. As expected.
I initially used it with headphones only, with the idea to upgrade to proper studio monitors later. When I made that upgrade, I ran into noise issues. The ground hum was reduced by powering my PC from an outlet across the room, separate from my speakers, but there was still noise related to PC activity; low volume whine on mouse movements, higher volume noise during GPU intensive operations (e.g.: games).
So while it's nice to be able to power the thing off of USB, it's probably better for use with laptops than battery powered laptops.
I tried reducing the noise by injecting external power using Ifi's iDefender. Unfortunately plugging that in resulted in a fast power cycle, which killed the USB connectivity. Some quick searching showed that I'm not the only one who had one break after a quick power cycle.
It feels like a firmware issue, but Focusrite support (who are apparently very busy and hard to reach at the moment) consider it a hardware issue, and suggest an RMA. In the meantime it's just a pretty brick, with a nice button to enable a pretty 48V status indicator light.