‘Air’ enabled Mic Preamps
The Clarett OctoPre includes 8 of the ‘Air’ -enabled mic pres, but what’s so special about them?
To design a new preamp for the Clarett series, Focusrite wanted to recreate the well-loved clean, rich and “airy” tone of their flagship transformer-based ISA heritage mic pres. With the Clarett preamps, they have managed to emulate this fantastic sound with plenty of headroom to record drums, guitars and any other high-level signal.
Yet you don’t need to have this classic tone on all your instruments. The ‘Air’ effect can be switched in or out on a channel basis. So if you want more of a clear, natural tone with less vintage character, you have the option.
Analogue I/O
The OctoPre’s 8 preamps are distributed like this: 2 on the front panel, both with instrument DI inputs. The other 8 inputs are found on the rear panel, and each can automatically switch to their own line-in input if plugged in.
Each channel features a balanced path from input to output with the exception of a relay–bypassed insert point allowing connection of EQ, compression or other outboard analogue processing to be permanently connected and accessed with the press of a button. In addition to being fed to the A–D converter, the input channels are available at the analogue outputs, from where they can, for example, be routed to a live mixing console while at the same time capturing the inputs digitally. The analogue outputs, which appear on a rear–panel DB25 wired to the AES59 standard, can alternatively be switched to pick up the ADAT inputs.
