I have been using a Focusrite Solo for the last several years and was considering upgrading. I'm using a Shure SM7B and with my old interface I found I had to crank it up to the max to get to the correct level. Was going to purchase a cloud lifter so I figured for extra bucks I should try this SSL. First off all, it was literally plug and play on my Mac. My Studio One software recognized it immediately. Secondly, the preamp is WAYYYYYYY better than my old interface. Not only in gain but it just sounds richer and smoother overall. Lastly I love the extra USB jack on the back for a 5v power adapter or power brick. So now I can use it to record directly into my ipad!! Brilliant!!

I wanted to like this more than I do. The mic preamp is good, no noise and more than enough gain, I'm sure any mic would work. The headphone out is causing me some grief, when increasing the volume from no to low listening levels there's a pan in output, no idea why. I've tested it on headphones and IEMs and with windows set to mono audio (and again with the headphones on backwards to make sure it wasn't my ears).

This might be a fixable driver issue, but with safe mode off there are artifacts in the audio output even without my pc being under any load. I haven't heard any with safe mode toggled on, but safe mode on adds, for example, 4ms of latency at 96/512 and 3ms at 96/256, more than doubling the output latency in that case. The overall times are still usable, even good, and this might be a YMMV depending on your system thing but it's odd that safe mode off had frequent issues.

This is all pretty minor stuff on the technical side to be clear, if your volume is at a moderate listening level there's no weird pan and if you leave safe mode on and use a high sample rate with a moderate buffer you end up with a fine round trip latency. There is a mix button but it's just a toggle, you have to mute the output in whatever software if you only want direct monitoring.

The feature side of things has some annoyances that won't go away, for me anyways. I keep noticing the absence of a mute button, the interface actually automatically mutes when you toggle phantom power which is neat but I wish it just had a proper mic mute. The meters could be more helpful, they're cool to have but 0, -10, -20 does not feel granular enough for you to set your gain with the meters alone.

This is very minor, and maybe only bothers me, but the main dial is monitor output and you only have a tiny knob for headphone volume (on which only a small range is usable, making adjustments finnicky). The interface has one mic input and one instrument input, not combos, which is completely fine for the price but to me it paints a picture where 80%+? of people using this will be using primarily headphones and it's just unfortunate not being able to use the nice big knob as a master volume. There's no software (beyond the asio driver) to customize things in and, while I get the analog thing, having a switch to swap the main knob to headphone or master would have been a really nice touch, something to indicate a coherent design for a specific use case rather than just a budget version of the console aesthetic. Build quality seems solid, I don't love the feel of the switches or the nuts under the small knobs but I have no doubt this would last for a long time, survive being thrown in a bag, and so on.

Overall, "It's okay". Budget interfaces seem really good now in general, and in that context this is probably fine. If you're purely using this for making music and listening on monitors then you'd probably rate this slightly higher than I did and if your setup is more on the side of using headphones and using your mic for other things, voice or streaming, etc. then you'd rate this lower. I'm in the middle and I'm not sure if I'll end up going with something else instead.

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