This is a review and detailed measurements of the Centrance R4 portable audio interface/mixer. It is on kind loan from member and cost US $449 when it was available.
The R4 is well built and controls have a quality feel to them. There useful indicators and lots of functionality:
I am going to test a subset of it.
My test platform is Windows 10. I downloaded and used the ASIO driver for all testing. There were a number of times when my Audio Precision software would hang, or lose connection to the driver/device. The AP is not the most stable software so some of this could be its own fault but the failure rate was well above average, substantially lengthening my testing. I would seek out advice from others before attempting to use the R4 on Windows.
Performance specs are confusing as they don't even tell you which output/inputs are being talked about:
Centrance R4 DAC & Headphone Measurements
The balanced outputs are oddly 3.5mm which I did not have on hand. So I tested using the headphone out. Input was USB. Let's start with our usual dashboard with USB gain set to max:
I wish the output would be at least 2 volts as this will hurt available power for headphone use. The bigger issue though is high noise floor and distortion. SINAD of 71 dB as represented by both of those, lands the R4 at the bottom of our pile:
Zooming in, we see that it is far worse than native interface on my workstation motherboard:
SNR can't even achieve 16 bit dynamic range:
Multitone output is much worse than it should be:
IMD test shows noise level that is a bit worse than a cheap phone dongle!
Jitter test shows really bad noise floor and man spurious tones/jitter components:
Linearity is the worst I have seen:
For some reason the driver refused to let me select 44.1 kHz half-way through testing so I could not test its filter. THD+N results are poor which may be partially due to that:
Switching to headphone loads, we see poor noise&distortion and inadequate output:
All in all, this is performance that I would expect from a $20 no-name dongle, not a proper professional DAC.
Centrance R4 ADC Measurements
I used the XLR connections which oddly have lower input voltage limit than the 3.5mm connectors:
Very odd that we are landing at the same SINAD as the DAC output! This is embarrassingly poor results:
Dynamic range barely reaches 16 bits:
Frequency response at 192 kHz is decent although there is some bass roll off even without the HP filter:
IMD test shows the effect of early distortion and saturation:
Same with THD+N vs level:
Conclusions
It is clearly that little attention was made to produce a well engineered and high performance audio interface. Yes, for the typical application of hooking up a mic and playing some background music it will be fine. But then how do you justify the $440 price? You can't. Clearly the company could do much better without incurring any additional manufacturing cost.
On basis of measured performance, I can't recommend Centrance R4.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The R4 is well built and controls have a quality feel to them. There useful indicators and lots of functionality:
I am going to test a subset of it.
My test platform is Windows 10. I downloaded and used the ASIO driver for all testing. There were a number of times when my Audio Precision software would hang, or lose connection to the driver/device. The AP is not the most stable software so some of this could be its own fault but the failure rate was well above average, substantially lengthening my testing. I would seek out advice from others before attempting to use the R4 on Windows.
Performance specs are confusing as they don't even tell you which output/inputs are being talked about:
Centrance R4 DAC & Headphone Measurements
The balanced outputs are oddly 3.5mm which I did not have on hand. So I tested using the headphone out. Input was USB. Let's start with our usual dashboard with USB gain set to max:
I wish the output would be at least 2 volts as this will hurt available power for headphone use. The bigger issue though is high noise floor and distortion. SINAD of 71 dB as represented by both of those, lands the R4 at the bottom of our pile:
Zooming in, we see that it is far worse than native interface on my workstation motherboard:
SNR can't even achieve 16 bit dynamic range:
Multitone output is much worse than it should be:
IMD test shows noise level that is a bit worse than a cheap phone dongle!
Jitter test shows really bad noise floor and man spurious tones/jitter components:
Linearity is the worst I have seen:
For some reason the driver refused to let me select 44.1 kHz half-way through testing so I could not test its filter. THD+N results are poor which may be partially due to that:
Switching to headphone loads, we see poor noise&distortion and inadequate output:
All in all, this is performance that I would expect from a $20 no-name dongle, not a proper professional DAC.
Centrance R4 ADC Measurements
I used the XLR connections which oddly have lower input voltage limit than the 3.5mm connectors:
Very odd that we are landing at the same SINAD as the DAC output! This is embarrassingly poor results:
Dynamic range barely reaches 16 bits:
Frequency response at 192 kHz is decent although there is some bass roll off even without the HP filter:
IMD test shows the effect of early distortion and saturation:
Same with THD+N vs level:
Conclusions
It is clearly that little attention was made to produce a well engineered and high performance audio interface. Yes, for the typical application of hooking up a mic and playing some background music it will be fine. But then how do you justify the $440 price? You can't. Clearly the company could do much better without incurring any additional manufacturing cost.
On basis of measured performance, I can't recommend Centrance R4.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
