As the flagship model in the Focusrite Scarlett range, the Scarlett 18i20 offers fantastic audio quality with comprehensive I/O and great expansion capabilities. Your recordings will shine with professional clarity with its 24-bit/192kHz converters. At the same time , Air mode (also present in the Clarett USB range but works slightly differently) emulates the famous boost in the mid-high frequency range — adding unique high-end detail, which was a renowned characteristic of Focusrite’s original ISA mic preamp at the famous AIR Studios. With eight mic preamps, 18 inputs and 20 outputs in total, the Scarlett 18i20 ensures you’ve got no shortage of potential for our recording projects. Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 18i20 3rd Gen USB Audio Interface Key Features: This device desperately needs hardware controls for user settings. With that, all Focusrite would really need to do to provide Linux support is to make the device USB class compliant. Unfortunately, since the driver is proprietary, the Linux driver is a reverse-engineered one that works but still has some issues, the device being as new as it is. The free/open source community will fix the driver issues in time, and the device is already quite usable, but all the troulbe make one beg the question: why make things so difficult, Focusrite?

Focusrite has upgraded the preamps on the Scarlett line for its third generation with all-new “Air” settings that aim to recreate the rich, open high-frequency response of the company’s standalone ISA preamps. The Air setting alters the signal before it reaches your DAW, so it’s a good idea to experiment with it before committing it to your recorded sound; sound; I found it to be a little crispy and harsh for my taste applied to drums and my voice, but it added some extra magic to my Casio synth and to distorted electric guitar in a very natural and organic way. For drums and vocals, I much preferred the 18i20’s preamps without the Air setting engaged; this rendered a relatively neutral-sounding recording with a bit of wooly low-end that was a nice departure from the brittleness commonly found in less expensive interface preamps. When activated, the Air setting gives you the Air effect found on the original ISA mic preamps, adding brightness and openness to your vocal and acoustic recordings. The Air feature is clearly proving popular, as Focusrite have now rolled it out across all of their interface ranges. In practice its main effect is to add quite a noticeable high-frequency boost; very often this simply anticipates what you'd have done at the mix anyway, but you do need to be careful with sources or mics that already have a lot of top end. (Note that the new Scarlett preamp circuit is not the same as that found on Focusrite's Clarett and Red interfaces, though: switching Air off on the Claretts changes the input impedance, whereas the new Scarlett preamps remain at the Air impedance.)Most of the new features are self-explanatory, and where they're not, they're usually implemented in the simplest way possible. For example, alternate monitoring on the 18i8 and 18i20 is basic but perfectly effective. Enabling speaker switching in Focusrite Control repurposes line outputs 3–4 to carry the same signal as the first pair, and a front-panel Alt button selects which of them is active or muted at any given time. The main front-panel Monitor level control governs both sets of outputs at once. It's not possible to specify a volume offset so that the main and alternate speakers can be level-matched from the Scarlett, but if that's important to you then it can usually be achieved further downstream anyway. For myself, the only monitoring feature I still miss is a mono button, but then I suppose Focusrite had to leave something for the fourth generation! (For the sake of completeness I should also mention that the firmware version I tested had a bug in it whereby enabling and then disabling speaker switching could lead to outputs 1–2 and 3–4 carrying the same signal and both being active simultaneously, but Focusrite are aware of this issue and have a fix in the works.) The best card I could find for the price which enables to do anything. Physical channels can be expandable with a preamp via an optic cable. 8 physical inputs are mostly enough for fieldwork.

The Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 3rd Gen USB Audio Interface features the best preamps ever used in a Scarlett audio interface and the largest range of I/O in the line. The Heart of Your StudioAdded the ability to change the colour of the good, pre clipping and clipping stages of the Gain Halos on Scarlett 3rd Generation interfaces. If your Focusrite interface needs a firmware update, it will update when you open the latest version of Focusrite Control, on a Windows or Mac computer. You need to connect your Focusrite interface to your computer before Focusrite Control will tell you if it needs a firmware update. Focusrite has done a great job with the new 3rd generation interfaces. While first glances may give the impression that they are just a prettier version of their former selves, the real magic lies under the hood. This is evident in many of the upgrades: Software interface is fairly intuitive and enables users to make alternative monitoring. Drivers are working without problem with Voiceomeeter Banana stuff. My old Steinberg card does not work with them properly.