greetings earthlings today i'm back with a review of the brand new interface from audient the evo 4
and if you are interested in this device it will set you back around 130 dollars like always i'll
throw some links down below and for the majority of this review i have the rode nt1 connected
directly to the evo 4 i have 48 volts phantom power turned on my gain set just at around 12
o'clock and i am recording at 24 bit 48 kilohertz i won't do any kind of post-processing but i may
boost it in post so check the doobly-doo to see what identity did and now let's talk about what
comes in the box but people are saying i'm becoming too violent so good box good buck
of course you are going to get the audio interface you'll get a usbc to usb a cable and a quick start
guide then as far as the build quality of this thing it feels decent at best it has an
all plastic construction which doesn't feel that sturdy the buttons do have a little bit of tactile
click to them but they don't have a decent amount of feedback and the xlr ports have quite a bit of
wiggle to them then on the top of the device you will find two channel selection buttons which will
allow you to select what input you want to adjust and you're also able to mute that input by holding
the channel button down for a few seconds which is just awesome to have then you'll have a smart
gain button which will automatically set the gain for that input all you have to do is press this
green button then press the channel that you want to set the gain of you'll play a song or
sing for a little bit and then hit the smart gain button again and it will calculate what your gain
should be set at and set it appropriately so you don't clip then you'll find a phantom power button
which allows you to turn on or off phantom power for each individual input then in the
center of the interface you'll find this big dial which allows you to control the microphone gain
the output volume to the headphones or monitor outputs the ability to change the mix between zero
latency monitoring and computer playback or the ability to adjust the pan of each of the inputs
to left or right then you have this button with a couple of faders on it which allows you to adjust
the monitor mix or the pan of the inputs and lastly you have a button to hit to adjust the
output volume on the front of the device you'll find a quarter inch instrument high z input which
takes control over input 1 and a quarter-inch headphone output which does allow for zero
latency monitoring and computer playback which you can hear at the exact same time and to wrap up
the walkthrough on the back of the device you'll find a usbc port to connect this to your computer
a set of quarter inch monitor outputs to connect your powered studio monitors or your power amp
and a set of xlr combination jacks for mic or line level inputs then as far as the specs of
this thing it has a bit depth of 24 bit and a sampling rate of up to 96 kilohertz it has a max
gain of plus 50 decibels for the microphone inputs it has an ein of negative 128 dbu an
input impedance for the mic inputs of 3 kiloohms plus 48 volts phantom power and here is a set of
the headphone output specs if you're interested in this information now to really test out the
preamps on the audient evo 4 i have connected the shure sm7b directly to this interface there is no
cloud lifter there is no fet head this is plugged directly into it and to get decent levels i had
to increase my gain to nearly 100 percent i am hitting around negative 9 db on my meters actually
a little bit lower than that for the majority of the time but here is how the sm-7b sounds with the
preamps at nearly 100 percent and i'll be quiet so you can hear the background noise from the preamps
now let's go ahead and measure the noise level of an xlr input using a 150 ohm resistor
now i want to demo the smart gain feature so first thing i'm going to do
is increase my gain to the point where i'm clipping and here we are i have set my game to 100
insanely distorted now i will hit the smart gain button hit channel 1 because that's where i want
to set my gain and i will keep talking i am talking i am talking so the interface
can learn what level i'm speaking at i will hit the smart gain button again and i may have to
be on the camera microphone right now but it is calculating calculating calculating calculating
and come on and there we go now it is set my gain to a level that is appropriate i am
not clipping and it set the gain so i'm hitting between negative 18 and negative nine decibels
which is perfect that's the exact level you should be recording at if you're live streaming you may
need to boost that a little bit more in post before it goes live but that's how that smart
gain feature works amazingly useful especially for beginners who don't know anything about setting
their gain level okay now something that's really cool about the evo 4 is that it actually allows
you to capture loot back audio meaning you're able to record anything that's being played out of your
computer so they do actually have instructions on how to do this in the manual but i will walk you
through it very quickly in the mac so you can see how it's done on the mac the first thing you'll do
is open up your audio midi setup then once you've done that you'll select the evo4 so you can adjust
some settings in there on the output tab for the evo 4 you will click on configure speakers and
when you first open this it will have main output left and main output right selected all you do is
click the drop down menu select loop back 1 and loop back 2 for the left and right channels and
you will have also had to have downloaded the evo app from audience website and when that's open you
will have this e and your taskbar so you click on that you set the loopback source to loopback send
and then you're ready to start recording so for this example i am using audio hijack i have two
instances of the evo four one for my microphone and the second for the loopback so if i click on
the loopback instance you can see that my inputs are set to channels three and four which i have
configured to be the loopback signal so now i have a song cued up in apple music i will hit play
and you could hear that and you could see it being recorded in audio hijacked through the
loopback functionality so that's how you would do it and the last thing that i want to demonstrate
using the screen capture is the fact that you're actually able to control the gain of the preamp
via your daw so you can see right here in logic pro i have this little gain dial and it says 23
so my gain is set at 23 db or something like that and i can go ahead and decrease this to
decrease the gain of the actual preamp on the interface or i can conversely increase the gain
to increase the gain on the preamp how cool is that you can actually control it via your software
as opposed to having to grab the dial on the device okay at a sample rate of 48 kilohertz
and an io buffer size of 64 samples we have a nine millisecond round trip latency or four and
a half milliseconds output when we jump to 128 samples 11 and a half milliseconds round trip
or 5.7 milliseconds output and when we jump to 256 samples 17 milliseconds round trip
or eight and a half milliseconds output and then with the sample rate of 96 kilohertz and an
io buffer size of 64 samples we have seven and a half milliseconds round trip
or three and a half milliseconds output when we jump to 128 samples nine milliseconds round trip
or 4.3 milliseconds output and when we jump to 256 samples we have 11.6 milliseconds round trip
or 5.7 milliseconds output next i want to demonstrate the instrument input on this
thing so i am going to play an electric guitar and an electric bass without any amp simulator so you
can hear how the di input sounds and then i will throw on some amp sims and play it in a full mix
all right so although this interface does leave a little bit to be desired i think it's an amazing
option especially for beginners and first up in terms of pros the smart gain feature i think
this is an absolute game changer especially for beginners who don't know how to set their gain
properly mainly because i find clipping distorted audio to be pretty dang offensive and this feature
will most likely and hopefully lead to many more people setting their gain properly and not having
that distorted audio secondly i absolutely love the sound of the di instrument input which is
something that audient just does amazingly well i loved it on their id4 and i love it on the
evo 4. thirdly the loopback functionality is an amazing feature to have especially if you want to
capture your computer playback for a stream or you want to capture a skype call for a podcast
additionally i love the fact that you can turn on or off phantom power individually for each
channel the headphone amp was extremely capable and i was able to drive these sennheiser hd 650s
to an extremely loud level even with the volume set to around 50 percent and
these meters i love the meters i would have liked to have seen some kind of indicator to where
you're getting to clipping but i understand it's a multi-function meter to indicate the headphone
playback and the microphone input as well as setting your levels so it wouldn't have been
very easy for them to do that but that's something i would have liked to have seen and then in terms
of cons the only real complaint i have about this thing is the build quality it is not terrible by
any stretch of the imagination but being that it's an audient interface i was just expecting a little
bit better so what i recommend the audient evo for absolutely especially for beginners at the
130 dollar price point the main selling feature for me is the smart gain feature because as i
mentioned some people just don't want to learn how to set their gain properly and this removes the
need for them to learn but on top of that it has zero latency monitoring an amazing headphone amp
an incredible sounding di instrument input balanced quarter inch outputs for your monitor
it essentially has everything that you would need a small interface to do for a beginning setup
all right that's going to wrap up for today but let me know in the comments down below do you
think this smart gain feature is really as amazing as i think it is or do you think i'm overblowing
it i really do think it's incredible if you found this video fun interesting or helpful
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you all so much for watching thank you so much for listening i'll talk to you next week bye