It's only been a bit over a year since the last post, but on the other hand, this one's been on the back burner for... oh, "just" around-about 4 years or so. Back in autumn 2021, i happened to catch a good local deal on this 18i20 gen2, promptly sold the gen1 i had to a bandmate at the time, and made this my "daily driver", before getting the chance to pop the hood or doing anything to it. Indeed - shock, horror, an interface that i used, without any mods! I know, i know, we all make mistakes...
To be fair, there's not much on the outside to tell the two apart. The front panel is a more decided black (as opposed to dark grey) and lacks the branded "lip" intruding into the front edge of the top cover, the level meter LEDs are now rectangular instead of round, and the three volume knobs look "more" metallic and have the indicator stripe black.
Similar story round the back - structurally identical. The optical output now has an orange shutter, but that may well be only down to whatever part number / supplier they decided on.
Nothing earth-shattering on the inside either, and perhaps unsurprisingly so. Wouldn't shock me if they only took a copy of the existing gen1 project and only did whatever modifications they needed to, to that. Why reinvent the wheel, right?
Same power supply, virtually the same components as previously. Although...
Oh, yeah, we're definitely plumbing new depths of no-name-ness - surely i'm not the only one who had never seen "Econd" electrolytics before..? "At least" they were CapXon in the gen1...
"Been there, done that" on the analog power supply side of things as well - classic LM317 / LM337 combo for the +/-6.9V & 48V rails.
The digital supply is, on the other hand, new - gone is the linear regulator, now replaced by a Monolithic Power Systems MP2227DQ. This one took me literally over an hour to track down; after giving up on googling, i ended up having to trawl through the datasheets of all the MPS buck converters still listed on Mouser, until i finally found this one, with the "Top Marking" listed as "7U".
Moving on to the brains of the operation, we once again encounter a two-chip solution, as in the gen1, albeit a different combo - the smaller chip is no longer a BGA, but a TQFP-64 package. The bigger one seems quite similar to the gen1, but i guess Focusrite paid enough to have the part numbers customized. XFR001C and XFR002C - Xmos FocusRite 001/002?
Digging through some past emails, at least the 64-pin XFR002C chip in the 2i4 gen2 was confirmed by Focusrite support to be an XU208-256-TQ64-SF10; could the big chip be the same XS1–L8A–64–LQ64–C5 as in the gen1? Or perhaps an XU210-256-TQ128 (or bigger)? I'm not determined enough to bother them just for this question, they've been more than generous enough in the past with bigger issues / items (quite literally).
That being said, the cores are powered by an MPS MP2159 buck converter, the clock is a Cirrus Logic CS2100, and the firmware is stored in a Macronix MX25L8006E flash memory.
Moving on to the analog side, we're back to sever deja-vu. I'm 99.8% certain everything on the input side here is identical to the gen1, and even more, the older Saffire Pro 40 - NJM2122's, NJM4565's, TL072's and HEF405x's.
Same story on the converter & output side - NJM4565's, CS4272's and a CS4392.
And a pair of venerable NJM4556's, once again, on headphone output duty.
Unfortunately, since i hadn't bothered even recapping this thing, i "also" didn't have much chance to dump the contents of the flash chip before selling it off, but oh well. At least it's comforting to know Focusrite aren't shy of sending out pre-programmed firmware chips, so there's that.
A bit underwhelming as this may have been, at least it's now here, for the sake of completion, if nothing else.
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