DREW KRAG: Hey guys, this is Drew Krag with Gearwire.Com for another Home Studio Workshop, and I’m here sitting on the floor with my favorite sound card, the Focusrite Saffire Pro 26 I/O. I’m just going to walk you through a few of the features on the front of this unit. Starting all the way at the left, we have eight line inputs, and there’s also eight XLR inputs on the back. The second you plug in anything to the front of this, it automatically will bypass the back. Now moving right along, right here we have two LEDs that indicate phantom power on inputs 1 through 4 or 5 through 8. Obviously, phantom power is for using condenser microphones to help power the microphone. Basically here are our eight channels. Each channel has gain and a high pass filter, and then on the first two channels you also have Lo-Z inputs and an instrument button if you plug in direct, which is very convenient. If you move over here, we have our monitor section. You basically have your main monitor volume, a dim which basically puts the signal down quite a bit, I believe -- I’m not sure exactly but it’s probably like 30 dB r maybe even more, so if you’re mixing and somebody’s trying to talk to you and you can’t hear them, you push this. You can still hear the music but now you can hear what the heck that person is saying to you. There’s also a mute which is very convenient and two headphone outputs and, obviously, your power switch. So, a pretty straightforward sound card, we’re going to flip this thing around and take a look at the back.

[DREW KRAG SHOWING OFF A POWER DRILL TO DISLODGE THE FOCUSRITE SAFFIRE PRO 26 I/O FROM RACK]

So here you have the back panel of the Focusrite Saffire Pro 26. You’ve got your power in that comes with a power cable (very convenient), SPDIF in and out (so there’s digital ins and outs), MIDI in and out (pretty standard), a word clock in and out for syncing things up, you have two FireWires, and then you also have ADAT ins (you have 1 through 8 and 9 to 16 in, and 9 to 16 and 1 through 8 out) so if you had some Apogee A-to-D converters or, you know, any type of A-to-D converter that uses ADAT, you can get essentially 16 extra channels into this unit hence Pro 26. You have 2 here, 16 here, and then 8 here.

So here we have outputs. We got eight different 1/4” outputs and then here we have eight XLR inputs, so all these can be made phantom power, and we’re going to plug this unit back in and just go through some more of the features.