Focusrite Clarett+ 4Pre

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!

Great sounding interface, high quality quiet preamps, great headphone amps, smooth sturdy knobs, well built.
Basically all of the important stuff is high quality, I won't go into details about it.

The Focusrite Control Software is great and very flexible.
However the text is tiny and there's no option to resize it.
If you're using a 4K monitor, it's gonna be very hard for you to read it.
I hope they update it in the future.

It's a bit strange you can't control the main outputs through the Focusrite Control software, apparently because the physical volume knob on the interface is a digital encoder and not a potentiometer, but still it feels like they could've solved it with a software update if they wanted to.

I was a bit surprised there's no built in loopback, especially considering the Scarlett range has it.
You can create your own loopback by sending outputs 3-4 to your SPDIF output and connecting that into your SPDIF input.
That of course will disable you 3-4 outputs from any other use, but you can switch between different setups in the Focusrite Control software pretty easily and quickly.
The phone app is also a nice bonus.

Also, the air mode really does sound different than the Scarlett range.

Overall great interface with great performance, despite the few quirks.