- Hi, I'm Jordan from Kettner Creative.
In this video, we're gonna help you figure out
if the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface has
enough power out of their headphone app
to supply a pair of 250-ohm headphones like these ones.
In this video, we're using
the Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro 250-ohm headphones.
And a lot of people wanna know
if these headphones will work well
with the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface.
Now, according to Focusrite, the specs for this,
that headphone jack output's plus seven dBu.
Now, how do you convert dBu to ohms? Does this work?
Do I need the 250? Do I need the 80-ohm version?
Do I need the 32-ohm version of another pair of headphones?
Hopefully my experience,
in this video will help you figure out what you need.
So we're gonna break this down
into three different categories.
In one category, we have music listening.
If you're just wanting to listen to Spotify
or iTunes on your laptop, and you have an audio interface,
I find for me that I set the monitor output level
somewhere between 65 to 70%,
and I'm getting a ton of volume,
more volume than I would wanna listen to
for 30 minutes straight.
And I still have about 30, 35% headroom
on the volume knob of this interface.
So for that use case, I would say that you're totally fine
with the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface.
The second use case is if you're a video editor
or you're working with audio that isn't mixed and mastered
as well as a finished product
that you're already listening to like a CD
or iTunes or Spotify.
In that case, when I'm video editing
and you're already working with audio
that's maybe normalized, but not fully compressed
and mixed and all that, I do find that
I'm happy with the volume out of this audio interface,
when that's set somewhere around 75%.
Again, that's still 25% headroom.
So this is really good for that use case as well.
Now the third case is doing exactly
what I'm doing in this video.
Some sort of talking head, you're recording it live.
If you look over in Logic right now,
I'm coming in at about minus 14.
And when I record videos like this,
generally I like to keep it somewhere between minus 18
and minus 12, just to give myself all that headroom.
So in this circumstance, if I'm recording a podcast
or something like this,
my monitor knob right now is cranked up all the way,
and I find I'm about 30 to 40% short.
That means I want more volume,
and I'm actually kinda distracted by how quiet it is
in my headphones.
So if I'm doing a podcast recording like this
for half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour,
I'm gonna be quite tired, just trying to listen
for the volume that I want out of these headphones.
But that being said, if you're doing a two-person podcast,
if you're recording across the table from somebody,
there's only one headphone output
on this audio interface anyway.
So you're already gonna be connecting it
to a headphone splitter app.
In which case you will get the gain that you need,
but connecting it directly to the audio device
when I'm recording right now, like I am,
somewhere between minus 18 and minus 12.
I do it's underwhelming,
and I do want more gain, more volume in my headphones.
So if I'm doing a lot of podcast recording,
a lot of dialogue, and the monitoring
during that process is important to me,
I would definitely be looking for either a headphone app
or the 80-ohm version of these headphones.
So I hope that input is helpful.
So for option one, music monitoring,
you have about 35% headroom, I'm setting it at 65%.
I'm super happy with it.
With video editing and working on my laptop,
generally, it's turned up a little bit more closer to 75%.
And again, I'm super happy, I have about 25% headroom there.
But when I'm recording like I am right now,
I'm turned up all the way. I'm like 20%, 30, 40%.
It's hard to really guess, somewhere in that range,
short of where I want it to be.
If you have any questions about anything
that we've covered in this video,
please leave a comment in the comment section below.
If you want pricing or specs for the SM7B,
the Cloudlifter, the headphones, anything like that,
that you see in this video,
please check out the links in the description below.
We have links to everything that you see here,
and if you wanna see more videos
and more headphone comparisons
with more pieces of equipment, please like, and subscribe.
Thank you so much for watching.
(upbeat music)