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.