Volt 2 Reviews

honestly my 6 yr old scarlett 18i8 broke and I got some friends with the apollo twin so i decided to go with the volt 2 because of my budget. in comparison to the apollo it's still got all the same problems with scratchy recordings at volume.

The twin offers the real features, with the volt there is no plugins that come with it that are useful and the features it has are very mediocre.

Vintage does nothing good in practice, generally just adding more noise, which i guess is technically warmer smh. nowhere near an actual tube.

for the price I can't really complain I got it because I was curious of it's capabilities but in actuality there is no real benefit over the comparable focusrite products.

I have the Volt 2 and use it with Ableton Live for a travel setup. The mic preamps sound nice and clean and I don't have any of the "crackles and pops at buffer sizes above 512" reported by some other folks.

Vintage mode puzzles me a little bit. It's basically a slight "smile" EQ curve with a 0.5dB bump at 50-70Hz and a +2dB shelf at about 8-10kHz or so. A bit more hype is present in the "air" frequencies, it seems to me (another +0.5dB maybe?). There might also be a tiny cut at around 500-600hZ, IIRC. The "warmth" is simply evenly-distributed harmonic distortion once the signal approaches -10 to -8dBFS. And it gets dirty quick up there.

The puzzling bit is that I generally aim for signal peaks of -12dBFS hitting the converters. This means I don't get any harmonic distortion with the Volt Vintage mode when following conventional wisdom around signal levels; just the EQ curve. I have better analogue means to add harmonic distortion at standard tracking levels instead of pounding the converters. Minus 1 star.

All-in-all, it sounds good and works well with Live and the e906, SM57, and K87-based mics I typically use. The Hi-Z input is bog standard and I don't find the Vintage mode to be useful there. Other than the somewhat disappointing Vintage mode, I like it for what it is: a good-sounding, solidly-built interface with a decent form factor for travel rigs. Oh, and a reasonable price for UA kit is rare!