 This audio interface and I both feel warm and fuzzy inside. Why? Let's take a look at the Sonno from Audient. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The marketing team at Audient would probably like me to describe the Sonno as a guitar interface, but I feel like I'd be doing an incredible service, because this interface can easily serve at the heart of your studio recording vocals and other instruments, including drums alike. However, there's a feature at the core of this interface which makes incredibly unique and a big bonus for guitarists and bass players alike. We'll be looking at that later. Now there's a lot to cover in this video. We've got demos from myself and my mate Dan, the lonely rocker who's going to be pushing this a little bit harder than me. We're going to be taking a look at the awesome onboard DSP effects, but we're going to start off with the hardware. The Audient Sonno is a 10-in 4-out audio interface with 96 kHz 24-bit recording. It has an all-metal enclosure and it probably goes without saying for an Audient interface, but all of the knobs, buttons and connections are solid as a rock. Now all of the really cool stuff is on the top, but let's delay gratification and head to the back for the more standard fare. And pretty standard fare for Audient is actually two very nice ASP console mic prees with a combo connection for both XLR and quarter-inch jacks. Each of these inputs has independent 48-volt phantom power, which means you can switch it on for mics that need it like condensers and off for mics that don't like ribbons and other dynamics. Moving along we see the standard balanced outputs for your monitors and next to that an optical input that supports both SPDIF and ADAC. Using this connection with something like the ASP 800, which I'll be looking at in a future video, means we can record up to 10 inputs simultaneously, great for drums or great for live band sessions. We connect to our computer via a USB-C connection, but this unit is not USB powered. The reason for that is going to become evident later, but we actually powered the unit with the supplied 12-volt adapter. At the front we see the first of our dedicated features for electric guitar and bass players with a quarter-inch guitar input and a dedicated re-amping output. This makes re-amping an absolute breeze with no need for any additional re-amping boxes. Further along we see our headphone output which can be set up with a different mix to our main monitor output. On the top we see our gain controls for our mic pre's as well as an indicator for phantom power. We then have our level controls for speakers and headphones followed by a mix control to blend our input monitoring with our door sound. Okay so far what we've seen makes us a very capable interface with the kind of high quality that we've come to expect from Audient. However I've been willfully ignoring the features which give this interface its special source and that special source comes in a tube. Yes the Sonno uses a high voltage 12ax7 tube or valve as they call it in the UK for two stages of absolutely 100% non-simulated analog warmth and saturation. The bass, mid and treble controls make it feel like you're dialing in a tone on a real amp because you are. The input, drive and output controls let you find control how much grit and warmth you are adding at each stage and it's not just guitars and basses that can take advantage of this. You may have noticed earlier that I didn't mention the two valve switch on the back and its indicator on top. We can actually use this to send things like mics or synths through to our tube stages. Now most guitar amps sound pretty awful until they're connected to a cabinet and that's usually where all the trouble begins. One of the advantages of recording guitars through an audio interface is avoiding the use of loud cabinets which can ruin your relationships with spouses, parents, neighbors, take your pick. Not to mention the issues of setting up space, room reflections, limited mic choices, the list goes on. On the other hand recording guitars through amp sims can have its own issues. They lack a certain something and also you can suffer with latency which can really affect your performance. Now we know that Audion already have the amp stage covered. They've got an amp inside the audio interface but they've teamed up cleverly with some of the best people on the planet for cabinet simulations, two notes and they've come up with an on-board DSP latency free solution for us to take a look at now. So probably the most important thing to understand about the software you can see on the screen right now is that it doesn't actually process any audio on your computer. The actual audio processing happens on the interface itself and this software just acts as a remote control to change the settings on that. That's really important because it means there is no latency as you're playing. Latency is that slight delay which occurs when you play through an audio interface and then it gets processed through your door, perhaps through an amp sim and then comes back to the interface and comes out through your headphone or speakers. It's really off-putting as a guitarist or bass player when you're playing can really affect your performance. So the fact that this happens and is latency free is a really big bonus here. So what kinds of different sounds can this software make? Well let's start off with the sort of how we operate it. We'll start off on the left-hand side here. At the top here you can see some presets. We can actually save three presets which we can have easy access to. You can see mine here I've got a variation happening with preset A. Importantly I just want to note that there is a button on the interface itself which you can press to switch between these presets and you can switch between them even when you're not working through a door or through your computer. So very very handy indeed. Below that we get our main area where we can select different cabinets. Now there's actually I think over 150 cabinets available in the store for this system. However you do get 20 cabinets with the interface and I have to say those 20 cabinets are very very comprehensive. If you really want something very specific you may you know purchase one of the other cabinets down the line but you get a really great selection out of the box here. I wouldn't be thinking that oh I'm going to have to buy more cabinets right away. Now you can sort of filter out those cabinets. I've got it selected to only show guitar cabinets at the moment not bass cabinets. We can have some favorites and we can also filter out the ones that we've got stored on the unit. The ones that are available online and the ones which are on our computer. Now importantly what I want to point out here is that with those 20 cabinets that you get you can load eight at a time onto the actual unit which means there's no loading time between while you switch between them. That means you can sort of have your eight cabinets that you often use there. Now if you do need to load the others from the computer it doesn't take that long it's just not kind of instant like we'll see in a moment when we select the ones on the unit. So there's a way of filtering things in. So that's the basis of actually choosing the cabinets. By the way if you do go for some of the online ones and you haven't purchased them you can use them right away. I think there's some silence inserted every so often something like that. So you do get to really try them out before you grab hold of them. Now we get to the important part the actual processing. There's really not much to it. There's four main sections here. First of all we've got the power amp section. So this is where we actually add a bit of sort of grit and warmth to our signal. Let's see how that sounds to begin with. Before I get into this I just want to quickly play you the track that I'm going to be using which has got nothing on it at all so it's not going through this at all. This is the DI guitar track. Pretty ordinary DI guitar track. So without doing anything at all without adding a room or changing a mic or adding anything much to the signal let's see how that sounds just going through this basic setup. So right away I mean it's not what we're going for but right away you can hear the difference that makes to a guitar tone just using a basic setup. Okay so let's look at this power amp stage here. This is as I say where we can add some grit. Let's gradually add some grit into this signal. That's the kind of effect that you get on an actual amplifier when you're playing into. In fact we are going through a real tube here remember. So it's not so much of a simulation as you get on other systems. Okay so that's the beginning of it. It's probably not exactly what we're going to be going for in the end result but we will get there. Now the next one speaks for itself. It's the tone control. You can go from dark through to bright. I think that should speak for itself. Let's just have a listen. We'll start off on dark. I'll just bring that down a little bit so it's not too gritty and have a listen to this. Okay so that's an overall kind of tone control there but now we get into the nuts and bolts of it. This is where we marry our cabinet with our room over here and the way we do that is is that we gradually move the microphone away from our cabinet. If it's right up against the cabinet just like in real life you basically get the cabinet sound. You're not hearing much of the room but as you move it away you get more and more of the room and it's really the room over here that we're going to be interested in the moment. But let's just try the basic effect of adding this in or sort of moving the microphone away. Now I tend to find that a roundabout there up to here you know is really your main range. You can go far away like this have a listen. I mean if that's the sound you want then that's fine. Now remember each different type of room is going to have its own characteristic. Okay we have eight live rooms available. Let's go through them now. I rather like the loft I have to say so I'm going to leave it on there for the moment. So you can see there that as I'm changing through these things by the way there's no loading time yet it's just bang bang instant. Okay so very very sort of quick and economical in that way. So you know each of those rooms is going to have a different feel or a different sound to it and then you can blend it into more or less degrees. Now before we go into the different cabinets and microphones down here which is incredibly important I just want to finally finish over here with this contour control. Okay this starts from a very warm sophisticated kind of sound on modern to a very sort of more broken up harsher sound on vintage. Let's see or hear the difference that that makes. Make it hot. Okay so you get the rough idea there. Now what the two of the things that really make a massive difference to the sound of course are the cabinets and the microphones. So let's start off by going through the microphones. You get eight with this okay and they're based on some of the most famous microphones used for recording guitar and bass cabinets. So I'm just going to play this again we'll just bring a little of the room out of it here and then we'll just go through these different microphones. You'll hear the massive difference it makes right away. So that's the microphones. Now of course we get to the cabinets all have their unique sort of character. Now as I say you get 20 with the system. They're some of the most famous ones. I've got eight loaded up on the unit at the moment. I'm just going to flick through some of them so you can have a listen. So that's the basis of this software. There's some other details I could go into but this would just give you a flavor of what you can do. Hopefully you can see that it's sort of very organic and it's akin to actually miking up a cabinet in the real world. You're basically working with different environments, different cabinets, different microphones and a little bit of basic processing over here. It's actually quite simple but incredibly powerful. Now I'm not the greatest of electric guitar players but I thought I'd give it a go to demonstrate some tone to you. So I grabbed the Gretsch down off the wall, plugged it into the solo and using the onboard DSP used the Vox style simulation of cabinet. See what you think of the result. So to demo something a bit heavier I called on my mate Dan from the YouTube channel The Lonely Rocker. Dan is a much more capable guitarist than I and he kindly sent me over some dry guitar tracks with some backing so that I could re-amp them through the unit. Now I did that by just sending his dry signal out from the re-amp output and then using a patch lead went straight back into the interface so that I could use the onboard DSP effects. Now we're going to focus on rhythm guitar to begin with and for that I chose a classic Marshall style cabinet. Oh by the way if you're finding this video useful could you go ahead and hit the like button for me. Do it right away so that you don't forget and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell so that you're notified about my other videos. Now of course like any guitar amp you're welcome to use pedals on the way in and for this demo where Dan was playing a little bit of lead I wanted to drive it a bit harder so I used the classic Tube Screamer pedal. Also listen out a little later on the demo for some clean guitar which has got a little bit of chorus on it. So before I get into the pros and cons I just want to thank my mate Dan from the YouTube channel The Lonely Rocker for supplying those tracks for me so that I could demonstrate that style of playing through this interface for you guys. Check the link in the description down below for his channel and make sure you subscribe. He's got lots of great content on there. Now in terms of pros as I alluded to at the beginning of this video this is a great all-round interface which can serve at the heart of your studio especially if you expand it with something like the ASP800 to get those extra inputs. Now in terms of a guitar or bass interface well I mean it's just heavenly to be honest with you. No latency, a real amplifier the only thing that's really simulated is the cabinet and the room and it's just got that completely organic feel about it. It sort of distracted me to be honest with you. I should have been making this video and I found myself sitting there for several hours just playing through it and enjoying myself. That's a mark of a really great product. In terms of cons I want to be balanced about this okay I do want to offer you some pros and cons but at this price point I don't know if it's fair to offer any cons I mean there's no fault I can find with the hardware or anything like that. It worked really sort of well the latency in terms of using it for other things was absolutely fine. Is there any other interface at this price which has these kind of features I'm not sure let me know in the comments down below if you think there is especially is there something with a real valve or tube inside I'm not absolutely sure I'd be interested to hear about that from you guys. If you're going to sort of whinge about it maybe you could go I don't like the color or something I don't know that could be a con grasping for straws. Anyway thank you for watching this video do check the link for this product in the description down below for prices in different parts of the world while you're there also check out the link for my patreon.com where for as little as $1 per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this and I'll see you in the next video.