I’ve never seen the value in spending exorbitant amounts of money on recording interfaces. I started recording in the early 2000s, so I’ve been at this long enough to remember digital in its earlier days when you really did “get what you paid for” as far as an interface was concerned. Anyone who started on most early interfaces can attest that the conversion and preamps were not great. It was a night and day difference moving up to the nicer offerings, but those were not cheap. Over 20 years later, I think we’re pretty spoiled by some of the options we have at accessible price points. Quality versus price isn’t necessarily the barrier anymore. I worry more about the ever-increasing turnover rates in tech and how accustomed we’ve all seemingly become to quicker cycles of planned obsolescence.
I know everyone has different use cases and needs, but I get uncomfortable thinking about spending upwards of $3000 on an interface. I run a tracking facility, where I’m regularly recording full bands and need multiple cue setups, but I’m a minimalist at heart, so I’ve been able to get away with 16 channels of I/O for a long time. Last year, however, I made the move into the world of immersive audio with a Dolby Atmos system in the control room. I had to pretty much redo my whole setup and start from scratch. I’m not looking to just remix stereo projects into Atmos; I want to record and produce specifically for the format, which means moving into the world of Ambisonics and multi-microphone arrays. As if multiplying your speaker count over five times wasn't expensive enough, the interface options for people like me are not exactly “budget.” Most manufacturers seem to be catering to either bedroom studios that only need to monitor in Atmos and not track, or they assume you’re Blackbird Studios and you need everything times 100 and charge you accordingly.
Enter Focusrite's USB Type-C ISA C8X. Focusrite had already been on my radar with their RedNet line. I’ve seen those at larger facilities with immersive setups, and it seems like a brilliant system. I don’t think I’m quite ready to take the plunge into the world of Dante yet, as I’m not sure the investment makes sense for me. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see the ISA C8X seemingly come out of nowhere at $2,000. It could fit the bill for me here and cover a lot of ground while I start to build up the control room and figure out how I need to grow over the next few years. At face value, this seems like a killer offering at an affordable price point. The C8X has plenty of I/O with 8 mic and line inputs, 12 analog outputs, S/PDIF and ADAT I/O, and even MIDI in and out on the back panel. The front panel has two instrument inputs and two headphone outputs.
The first thing to get out of the way is the conversion and what’s going on under the hood. At this price, my initial assumption was that the C8X was going to be Scarlett or Clarett guts with a few more outputs to accommodate a basic 7.1.4 Atmos system and two ISA preamps. It would have been easy enough for Focusrite to do that and still justify the price (a Clarett+ 8Pre interface and ISA Two combo is within $100 of the ISA C8X), but it does seem like they wanted to go the extra step with their first offering in the ISA interface range. Although this is a new design and not just a recycling of different designs from their other offerings, Focusrite opted to use most of the same components from the RedNet range for all the conversion in the ISA C8X. It was an audible positive difference to me even within the first few minutes of connecting speakers and listening to some music. Everything sounds excellent and classy going in and out of the ISA C8X; it’s already hitting well above its price point just on the conversion side. This is not a budget interface with a few extra features.
Next up are the two ISA 430 preamps with Lundahl input transformers, as they’re the focus for this line. I’ve always had a few channels of ISA preamps in my life and enjoy them quite a bit. Although there’s a Rupert Neve lineage behind them, I never treated them like a 1073, which you would “push into” a bit. I always appreciated 430s for being fairly clean and transparent with just the right touch and sprinkle of color and body. The mid-’80s was an interesting time for recording gear, and I think a lot of companies started going so far down the spec and linearity rabbit hole with their designs that it moved the preamp designs of that era into sterile-sounding territory. I always saw the ISA preamp as one of the pinnacles of cleaner preamps that pushed analog and transformer-based designs to the edge without losing that “color” that we all long for today.
Aside from what we’ve become accustomed to feature-wise with ISA preamps over the years, there are some welcome additions to them inside the ISA C8X. It’s helpful to have four different impedance settings to load different styles of microphones correctly (or purposefully mismatch them, which I find myself doing more often than I probably should), but the most exciting thing to me was the digital control over all these parameters. I have to record myself fairly often in my separate live room, and it was pretty amazing to bring up the refreshed Control 2 app on my phone and adjust everything on the ISA preamps while outside of the control room. I can’t think of another preamp loaded with features like this that I can control on my phone. That alone is going to be incredibly handy for a lot of people. There is also a new 430 Air mode option that’s analog inductor based to give a nice lift on the higher frequencies. The new Console mode is another all-analog circuit that allows control of the amount of saturation. Unlike the 430 control, which is either on or off, Console mode lets you dial in the amount to taste. My favorite aspect of Console mode is that there’s no real change in perceived loudness when adjusting the level, so you can’t trick your brain into thinking more is better because your source gets louder. Once again, you can make all these changes with controls on the physical unit as well as through the software on the Control 2 app on your computer or phone. At this point, we might assume an update to the whole ISA preamp line is coming soon.
The ISA C8X also comes with six cleaner preamps that have an analog Air mode as well as a DSP-based adjustable Drive circuit and Auto gain. Although this is technically a new design, Focusrite told me that these preamps are based on the same preamps found in previous offerings like the RedNet 4 eight-channel preamp (which was almost $2,500 when released). It definitely shows, as the last time I used any of the built-in Focusrite interface preamps was years ago on early generation Scarletts. I was not a fan. I found them to sound thin and a bit harsh, with a noise floor that was constantly getting in the way on quieter sources. Focusrite has come a long way in these newer generations. These six additional preamps sound pretty linear, but they don't have quite as much of a low-end push as the nicer ISA’s (which is not surprising). They are smooth sounding on the top end, and the noise floor was more than quiet enough on everything I tried them on.
I did a lot of experimenting with a 5.0 microphone array using a group of Vanguard Audio Labs V1 [Tape Op #135] microphones through five of the Focusrite preamps. Even with the array spaced out about ten feet from a quieter acoustic guitar to add some room tone in an Atmos recording, everything sounded classy and almost dead quiet. I also found myself pushing the Drive circuit quite hard on roomier sources in some instances. You can really shave some transients on drums when the Drive circuit is used subtly. On an outside kick drum mic, I was able to go from thumpy and pillowy with the Drive circuit off to a more aggressive rock tone with more attack when Drive was engaged and pushed. Either tone would have been great depending on the genre.
As far as integrating an Atmos speaker system into the equation, the ISA C8X provides enough analog outputs on the back panel to run my 7.1.4 setup. I’m lucky enough to already have an Audient Oria [Tape Op #163] interface that has built-in Sonarworks integration for speaker correction and calibration, so I’m able to run the Oria as an external monitor controller alongside the ISA C8X. It was always my intention to upgrade to a more extensive interface and run the Oria like this, so it’s a perfect solution for me. The only thing I would like to see Focusrite implement at some point is the ability to do delays on each speaker inside the Control 2 software. I know there are varying opinions on the use of speaker calibration software, but with Atmos systems the ability to implement delays on each speaker is essential for the system to work correctly. There are a lot of third-party solutions out there for this, but adding that feature would make the ability to get up and running with Atmos more self-contained.
Overall, I think the ISA C8X is a smart option for a lot of people out there who need a step up from the Scarlett/Clarett interfaces but don’t want (or need) to dive headfirst into the larger RedNet range with all the extra digital expandability. At just under $2,300, it’s at a unique price point in the market and hits well above its weight class. Two of Focusrite's top-of-the-line analog preamps plus six more very linear/clean, low-noise-floor preamps with top-tier conversion and expandability really shouldn’t be this affordable. I think Focusrite did a perfect job on this one!