What Is Smartgain?
British pro audio manufacturers Audient have been slowly dipping their toes into the recording musician market for a while now with a line of well executed affordable desktop interfaces. More recently, their EVO sub brand has been making waves with a bigger rethink of what an interface should be as seen by the end user, bringing a few ergonomic shifts with it. Of these, Smartgain is undoubtedly the headline feature. This level-setting tech does exactly what it says on the tin: press a button or two, play, then press record following successful analysis of the input.
Who Is It For?
With features like Smartgain, and an implementation of loopback that just about anyone could get their head around, the EVO line is aimed fairly and squarely at the recording musician or creator who needs to get things done without worrying about the numbers. While Audient do not claim EVO to be something aimed at the professional, the interface also has uses for those pros who maybe need a second interface for simple live capture or pre-production duties. Levels can of course be set manually, but the professional with one of these boxes in their inventory might well be wondering if Smartgain has the chops to be relied upon.
How Does It Perform?
Watch in the video as we try Smartgain with EVO 16 on guitar and snare drum to see how it compares to a manually-set input gain level.
Smartgain: For The Pro?
For non-engineers, Smartgain takes care of one of the biggest barriers to a quality recording: that is being too cold, or too hot. However, for many pros, staying out of the weeds and away from full scale is so intrinsic to their skillset as to render Smartgain less of a requirement in the pro studio.
With dynamic sources, it does tend to set levels slightly hotter than I would to the tune of 4-6dB. Whereas I like to hit around -18dBFS at the top, Smartgain often takes things higher leaving it open to overs when faced with musicians who are ramping up towards ‘the one’. Having contacted Audient about the target level, they confirmed that the target is indeed -12dBFS.
On a per-channel basis, the pro could certainly set their own levels quicker than Smartgain. This is owing to the fact that its analysis time has to be long enough to capture a reasonable average to head off any rogue levels. This is up against human intuition with a sixth sense for drummers and guitarists’ attitude to levels!
That said, with myself as the source, during my time with EVO 16 I have found myself using a mixture of manual and Smartgain, simply because it continues to work even with some sneaky attempts to trip it up. And yes, it’s just generally cool anyway so why not? Moreover, for simultaneous level setting, it is quicker for pro and creator alike. Smartgain is a great idea, well-executed. For me, that makes Smartgain useful under certain circumstances. Infallible? No. Smart? Absolutely.