Focusrite Saffire PRO 40: Because Focusrite Dupri's, Or Wha-Eva
The Focusrite booth felt like St. Crispin's day, what with all the happy Brits jumping about, smiling. The source of their joy may have very well been the Focusrite Saffire PRO 40, a firewire interface that offers 20 channels of I/O and a cornucopia of software controlled routing options to boot.
The finer points of the Saffire PRO 40 are discussed in this video; it's like you're right there, interacting with real British people! What you don't get is the smell of mulled-wine and sudden, overcoming awe and respect for Her Majesty. It's a proximity effect thing.
FOCUSRITE REPRESENTATIVE: Good morning and welcome to AES, the very first minute, the very first hour, first day of AES 2008 here in San Francisco.
First of all, we have Saffire Pro 40, new at the show today. It’s -- Actually it’s going on the worst night, last night, about midnight, I know because I typed the last few words, Saffire Pro 40, our latest FireWire interface, a 20-in, 20-out audio interface featuring the DICE chip as well.
Saffire Pro 40 features eight Focusrite mic pres. That’s important because Focusrite do pres. Unlike a lot of other brands out there, this is something that we’ve been doing for about over 20 years now, so the Saffire Pro 40 features eight mic pres along with 10 analog line outputs, 8 ADAT outputs, and 2 SPDIF outputs, and that gives you 20 I/O if we look at the ADAT and the SPDIF as I/O, but wait there’s two I/O missing. Well there’s two inputs missing and they’re here. That’s the loop back inputs. It’s a virtual input that allows you to route audio from another software application through the Saffire Pro unit, kind of like a ReWire but physical ReWire without any latency of course.
So running through the unit, in terms of the hardware on the front panel, walking left to right, you’ve got your two mic inputs. These are combi inputs. I’m going to pull one out so that line or microphone XLR inputs, phantom power in two banks 1 to 4 and 5 to 8. The first two super channels feature instrument inputs as well with a 9 dB pad. There’s your other level controls for the other mic pres. And then we have this gorgeous metering display on the front of the unit. It’s a five LED metering display, two headphone outputs on the output, each with its independent level control, and a monitor output.
If we come away and we start to look at the software control for the Saffire Pro 40, it starts to make you realize just how flexible this monitoring here is. The monitoring section of Saffire Pro 40 Control allows you to choose monitoring presets (2.1, 5.1, or stereo), and it automatically sets them up, but if you’re not happy with that, you want to change, you can just switch different lines, on/off at the click of a button, as well as that you can make this hardware controller control any one of these output selections, so very flexible monitoring.
So Saffire Pro 40 Control, the Control software behind Saffire Pro 40, allows you to route just about anything to anywhere, so a lot more flexible than any other software at this price point, so you have all your different mixes up here, you can create 16 different mixes of any input, DAW or analog input, and send them to any selection of outputs, and that’s not restricted to stereo pairs. That’s any input or DAW output to any output or mix thereof.
So, that’s the Control software, that’s the hardware, that’s Saffire Pro 40, the best sounding and most flexible and reliable interface in its class.
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