LEWITT Connect 2

LEWITT aim to keep things simple with an elegantly designed interface and some very helpful software.

LEWITT say the Connect 2 is “the most user‑friendly audio interface”. They also say you can get a sensational sound in a few clicks and that it will guard against distortion, has three iconic preamp sounds, will add compression and denoising like a pro and is completely intuitive to use. Sounds like my kind of thing! Let’s have a look.

The out‑of‑the‑box experience is really quite yummy. The packaging is nice, you get a nicely wound and lengthy USB‑C cable with a useful USB‑A adaptor, and the interface itself is rather pleasing to the touch and has a nice weight to it. It has a smooth curve and a nice angle to it and is covered in a rubberised texture with raised markings tattooed across the surface. When you connect it up, a ring of white LEDS glows alluringly at you before softening into illuminating your chosen input.

The controls are all baked into the touch‑sensitive surface, so you expend no energy in enabling functions and moving parameters. This is all fingertip stuff. The connections are hidden around the back and offer a single mic input with 48V phantom power, a guitar input, speaker outputs and two sizes of headphone jack. It’s about the size of your hand, and everything important happens within the space of your fingers. The design, look, feel and solidness on the desk are top‑notch and even a little bit sexy.

There’s no software card or bundle of plug‑ins in the box and honestly I’m fine with that because nobody needs another copy of Ableton Live Lite. From the website, you can download the LEWITT Control Center software, which gives us level and monitoring controls and access to the DSP processing, preamp modes and settings. It comes complete with the reassuring ASIO drivers for Windows. There is an online manual presented in a sort of FAQ style, which is comprehensive, but you can’t print it, download it, or read it offline. Oh, and I spoke too soon: if you scroll down far enough, you can bag yourself a free copy of Cubase LE for desktop or Cubasis LE for iOS.

Hands On

I like how the cabling chaos is kept around the back, leaving the control surface clean, minimalist and sleek. The surface gives you a ‘button’ for each input and output, and then the single circular track in the middle acts as the level control for the selected function. As you tap to select each one a green LED lights around the circle to show you the current level setting. If you are playing back audio or speaking into a microphone, then the level of that will be shown by a bright circle of white LEDs, starting at the seven o’clock position and going clockwise.

The options themselves are guitar, microphone, speakers, headphones, direct monitoring mix and then a customisable button, which by default brings up the software control panel. At the top is a usefully large mute button. You can tap the button to mute the currently selected function, or you can tap and hold to mute everything all at once. You can’t unmute everything in the same way, unfortunately; you have to go through them one by one. In the middle is a button that activates the Autosetup for the chosen input, which we will come to shortly. That’s all for the hardware controls.

The touch controls work well enough and feel smooth, with a light touch. It’s visually fabulous, with the LEDs and functions looming out of the dark surface. When you hit mute, it all lights up in a very dramatic red, but if you find that too alarming, you can customise the colours to suit your taste. The custom button can be repurposed to toggle preamp styles, mute and unmute different combinations or even reduce the LED brightness. It’s all good, it works completely fine, and I’m definitely not missing the tactile loveliness of a real knob or button. Oh, who am I kidding? You can feel the absence of any real buttons or knobs, and while the interface is beautiful, it’s also not fully satisfying. You can find what you need without looking because of the raised texture around the function hot spots, but as your fingers search for the right one, you tend to inadvertently activate or select other things. I kept finding myself dragging my fingers around the LEDs rather than the inner circular track and had to keep correcting myself. With a physical knob, I have complete certainty; with this interface, I’m always having to look and make sure. Those are all mild criticisms that I’m certain would fade as you get the hang of it.

The Control Center software puts all the controls on a single page.

Hands Off

All of the changes you make on the hardware are immediately reflected in the Connect 2 Control Center, and this is also where we find the more interesting stuff. Each input channel has three preamp models, a clip guard, low‑cut filter, compression and a denoiser. The Clean preamp is a nicely transparent default setting; Warm is a slightly muddier version where all the top end seems to have wandered off; and then Vivid brings the top end back in and then some. They are not really the sort of choices that make you go ‘wow’, but after using it for a bit, I definitely preferred Clean on vocals and Warm on guitar, so there’s enough of a difference for the choice to be worthwhile. The Compressor pulls down any wayward peaks and boosts the overall volume to a more consistent level. Denoise asks you to be quiet while it analyses your surroundings and then acts as a noise gate.

The emphasis is on ease‑of‑use to the point where it doesn’t want to bother you with any controls other than an on/off button. But the Connect 2 goes even further than that with the incredibly useful Autosetup. The basic idea, and something that’s not entirely new, is to press a button, sing and play your instrument and the audio interface will set all the levels for you ready for recording. It is brilliant and also a little bit cleverer than what I’ve seen before. When you hit Autosetup, you are presented with three options: Microphone, Instrument or Mic + Instrument. The last option is the quickest. Just click the button, play for a few seconds and you are done. The other two options guide you through the settings, giving you more control and choice over your sound and actually teaching you about how to do that as you go.

Autosetup can automatically set levels for the mic or instrument inputs, or both at once.

So, with the microphone, it asks you to specify condenser or dynamic (for phantom power), whether you want the low‑cut filter on (and explaining why you might), then it does the 10‑second test. Next, it asks you to choose a preamp model with a couple of bullet points on what each one does, and then does the same with compression and the denoiser. And finally, you can choose to have the clip guard enabled, which is a limiter applied to the input to prevent distortion. The options for guitar are similar. Once you’re finished, your mic or guitar is perfectly set up for recording.

The Autosetup works really well. I can imagine this being superbly helpful to someone who’s not used an interface before. The Connect 2 leans into the podcasting market quite deliberately, and it’s probably fair to say that a lot of simplicity is for their benefit. And it’s the sort of thing you can set up once and then forget about.

When it comes to recording into a DAW, the levels are great, there’s plenty of headroom from the 24‑bit/96kHz converters, and the latency goes nice and low without as much as a blip on the CPU usage. It has a loopback function for routing other software outputs into your DAW and a switch to turn your two inputs into a stereo mix for direct streaming. I should point out that there’s no dedicated stereo line input. I could happily run a synth through the instrument input so it can be used for more than guitar, but the mic input only has an XLR socket and so is best kept for microphones.

The Connect 2 is a slick‑looking interface with minimal connections and minimal fuss.

Conclusion

Overall, the Connect 2 is a slick‑looking interface with minimal connections and minimal fuss. The Autosetup is excellent and it really is as easy to use as they claim. I would like just a little bit more control over the DSP side so that I can soften the compressor, reduce the severity of the noise gate, or explore the preamps. The touch‑sensitive interface is a little slow to respond to, and the volume changes in your headphones are not altogether smooth. But it does look great on your desk.

Why not also read our review of the LEWITT RAY from SOS May 2024?