Focusrite Blue 245
Focusrite's first converter - a 20-bit A-D in a slab of aluminum that cost £2,250 and made mastering engineers look twice.
Overview
The Blue 245 is a 20-bit A-D converter. It was Focusrite's move out of the analogue domain and into digital. The company researched digital conversion for roughly three years, decided the technology wasn't good enough yet, and let the program sit for the better part of a year. It reopened in early 1994 with a fresh approach. The Blue 245 appeared in preproduction form at the Audio Technology 95 show, with production units expected in October of that year.
The result is a two-rackspace-high box with the styling and construction of the other Blue-series units. The chassis is heavy slab aluminum, which works as both the package and a highly effective electromagnetic screen. At £2,250 in the UK, it was never a casual purchase. The companion Blue 260 D-A was expected to land around the same figure.
On the conversion itself, Focusrite got cagey. The company would say only that the unit doesn't use standard delta-sigma conversion and is unusual in its approach. Designer Salter wasn't giving anything else away. What is documented is that both the Blue 245 and the Blue 260 use the latest 20-bit Crystal Semiconductor chips launched at the Paris AES Convention. Focusrite chose them after doing development work on Crystal's 18-bit version and concluding the architecture was right. The chip layout makes it comparatively easy to keep a clean isolation barrier between the analogue and digital sides of the circuit, which matters with all those pins clustered around a small package. Focusrite's own framing was that there's no rocket science involved. It comes down to quiet, stable clocks, careful interfacing with jitter reduction, screened power supplies, and an unusual electronic front end on the A-D analogue input stage that holds the chip's low-noise floor.
The Blue 245 is unusually well-equipped for its era. It has both AES-EBU and SPDIF outputs, and besides the standard XLR and co-axial sockets it carries a TOS-link fibre output. External sync inputs conform to AES-EBU or wordclock and run anywhere between 28kHz and 54kHz, which allows varispeed operation. The internal clock switches between 33kHz, 44.1kHz and 48kHz. The digital output can go out as a full 20-bit signal or dithered and rounded down to 16-bit, which suits studios still cutting to 16-bit media. The front panel has analogue PPM metering, with further LEDs showing how close the signal is to digital overload. Preset sensitivity controls set the convertor's peak sensitivity in a manner similar to input gain.
Reception in the trade press was warm. One prominent mastering engineer, acting as a reference pair of ears during development, reportedly called it the first A-D convertor he'd heard that sounded as though an analogue engineer had built it. Studio-Sound (August 1995, p.54) assessed the strategy behind the launch. It noted that although the Blue 245 was part of the Blue range, the converters weren't aimed solely at mastering. Focusrite expected interest from studios mixing or transferring to 20-bit, whatever the media. The same report observed that Focusrite remained deliberately vague about the conversion process itself.
By the late '90s the Blue 245 had moved into working studios. Studio-Sound (October 1998, p.30) described a facility running a chain completed by the Blue 245, noting the dithering down to 16-bit and the oversized LED VU metering. The engineers professed themselves entirely satisfied with the quality of the conversion. The unit also turns up in period dealer listings as a demo-stock item at £1,795 against a £2,495 list.
The Blue 245 is an early digital product from a company whose reputation was built entirely on analogue. Its designer was openly skeptical of the digital technology available when the project started. It began Focusrite's digital line, paired with the Blue 260 D-A, and sat alongside the Blue 230 broadcast compressor and the Red 7 in the company's late-'90s catalogue.
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