Singer-Turned-Engineer Talks Audio Interfaces

Los Angeles, CA (July 29, 2024)—Audrey Martinovich set out to be an opera singer, but after interning at a local studio and catching the audio bug, she is now singing the praises of her favorite recording interface.

Martinovich, co-owner of Audio for the Arts in Madison, WI, where she interned, says that as the only woman in the audio program, she was driven to excel. “I took it very seriously and looked around for studios around Madison that might have internship opportunities and came across Audio for the Arts, which was one of the only studios that really specialized in classical music and acoustic music, which aligned with my interests and expertise.”

She subsequently worked her way up to become a full-time engineer and one of the owners, and these days is also an audio lecturer at the University of Wisconsin; a board member of the Chicago chapter of The Recording Academy and a member of its Producers & Engineers Wing; an active member of the Audio Engineering Society; an advocate for the SoundGirls organization; and much more.

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Audio for the Arts parlayed its focus on classical music recording into becoming a go-to remote service, she reports. Among her go-to tools are the Focusrite Clarett+ 8Pre 18-in/20-out audio interface and the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2-in / 2-out interface. “I probably have a handful of those,” she notes. Both are key to how she approaches on-site remote recording.

“The Scarlett 2i2, in particular, you can just throw in a bag with your laptop and a few mics, and I have all I need for lots of these gigs,” she says. “They’re just plug-and-play. And the 8Pre isn’t quite as small, but it’s still plenty portable. I set up wherever the gig takes me, set up however many mics we need for the gig, and just record directly onto my laptop. Sometimes those recordings end up on commercially available albums. Fundamentally I’m able to deliver a release level of recording quality with a very small, convenient, portable setup.

She continues, “The 2i2s often get used in an audio feed for something being livestreamed, whether in the studio or out on location. I’m able to give a stereo feed to the video engineer, and the audio and video get matched up easily and go out to the world with no fuss at all. The 2i2 is a very powerful, no-nonsense interface. At University of Wisconsin, they are in the process of equipping their audio lab with a whole arsenal of those, at my encouragement. The students are going to love that development.”