At the Winter NAMM ‘09 show, Focusrite unveiled is new Liquid Saffire 56 as well as two Focusrite FX Plug-in Suites.
The Liquid Saffire 56 is the company’s new flagship Firewire interface, marrying Focusrite’s celebrated Liquid technology with its new generation of Firewire interfaces (led by the critically acclaimed Saffire Pro40).
Two of the eight mic pre’s use the third generation of Liquid pre amps, building on technology used in the Liquid Channel and Liquid 4Pre.
This means that as well as six Focusrite transparent mic preamps, two further Liquid preamps each provide a choice of 10 different pre-amp emulations. These include emulations based on the Neve 1073, Pultec MB-1, Telefunken V72.
In addition to eight mic pres, Liquid Saffire 56 includes 10 analog outputs, 16 channels of ADAT i/o, stereo S/PDIF or AES i/o (on RCA phono), MIDI i/o, two virtual ‘loopback’ inputs for routing digital audio between software applications, and BNC wordclock I/O.
The Saffire Mix Control software provides ultra flexible control over routing and monitoring, which includes presets for immediate set up of commonly used mixing situations, and full metering across all inputs, outputs and submixes.
Meanwhile, the new Focusrite Plug-in Suite provides a collection of EQ, Compression, Reverb and Gating VST/AU plug-ins.
The Compressor and Gate have been modeled on Focusrite’s hardware devices, using the measurement of Focusrite’s custom optos to achieve a vintage optical sound.
The EQ module delivers a similar signature to the original Focusrite ISA EQ curves, and the reverb is based on classic studio designs and has been developed to allow users to get the right reverb sound with the minimum effort.
The new Focusrite Guitar FX Suite consists of 11 professional VST/AU plug-ins for guitarists.
These include five of the world’s finest guitar amp models and four distortion pedal effects, all courtesy of Overloud, experts in the field of accurate guitar amp modeling.
The amp models include plug-ins based on the Vox AC30, Marshall JCM900, Fender Twin, MESA Boogie Rectifier and the Fender Bassman.
The pedal models include plug-ins based on the Boss DS-1, the Ibanez Tube Screamer, the Electro Harmonix Big Muff and the Dunlop Fuzz Face.