Focusrite Producer Pack

Time for another gear review! This time, we will be taking a look at the Focusrite Producer Pack (also known as the ISA430 Mk11). According to the Focusrite website, it is “the pinnacle of Focusrite’s analogue channel strip technology”. We are inclined to agree, we like it a lot and use it on many of our recordings here at the Rooms of Red Bull.

We’ve been using the Producer Pack mainly on vocals, with the likes of Esperanza and theFringe getting some time in on it, but we have also had the chance to use it on some instruments. A bass recording was the most successful experiment, and it was sounding pretty good!

Here, you can see an image of the back of the unit. This is slightly different to the one we have here in the studio, as ours does not include the digital card (seen on the upper left hand side of the picture).

The I/O

On the device itself, there are various inputs. A balanced line and mic input (both XLR) and two unbalanced instrument inputs, one on the back and the second on the front of the unit. The mic input has four different impedances to choose from: low, medium, high and ISA. We don’t use the post-mic output, instead we stick to the main output which goes to the Tascam DM-4800 (channel five, to be exact). There are also two sets of insert points (sends and returns) available for use in the strip: there is a manual on/off button for both of these.

Features

We use the ISA 430 MKII quite a lot in the RoRB studio, and we have found quite a few features that we like about this piece of kit. Lets start off with the gain stage. This has not one, but two gain knobs. The first is your average gain knob, which goes up in steps of 10dB, but the second allows you to fine tune between the steps on the first.

The EQ section is fairly straight-forward to begin with. It starts off with hi- and lo-pass filters followed by two parametric EQ’s: lo-mid and hi-mid, moving on to the lo- and hi-shelves. As with many modern EQ’s, the separate sections can be activated individually. This, we think, is a nice feature, but we are not so fond of the fact you have to press the ‘all EQ in’ button to get any of it to work (although it does come in handy for bypassing the whole EQ section at once when doing A-B comparisons). Because of its clear and precise layout, the EQ section allows you to get what you want pretty fast, and many of our engineers have commented on the nice sound of the EQ. One last highlight is the ability to use most of the EQ’s to trigger the dynamics section.

There are a couple of things we haven’t used yet on this device: the compressor and the expander/gate. The compressor has two circuits: a VCA and a vintage opto-electric circuit. You can place the compressor either before, or after the EQ section. We haven’t had much chance to use this compressor as our engineers generally compress after recording. However, it does a good job of preventing clipping when high-level signals are being recorded. The expander/gate presumably does what it says on the tin, and no doubt it is good at it’s job, as the rest of this device does things well.

From things we don’t use to something we frequently use, next on the list is the de-esser. This comes after the expander/gate and you can select which frequency band you want to de-ess, rather than only have one choice. It works well and is pretty transparent, which is always important to our engineers. It gives the results fast without compromising on sound quality.

Many devices nowadays have VU meters, they are a popular element of audio units across the board. This one can be set to several sources including input, output and compressor gain reduction.

All in all the Focusrite producer pack is a very clear sounding pre-amp with an extremely flexible and advanced channel strip. You can get hold of one from Thomann for €2275.