How much better are the Clarett+ converters?

I'm going to be a PITA and say go for the "better" converters in the latest model.

It's a game of inches and across the board they add up as you overdub and layer in your arrangement.

If the price difference was huge then it's not worth it, but if it's a few hundred dollars then you'll soon forget about the extra expense 
and you'll be using the higher spec converters for years on heaps of recordings.

It's been a while since I looked closely at these, but for some reason I am thinking I thought the newer model was worth picking up over the older one.

I agree with Shadow K that the difference won't jump out at you unless you really have a special setup to hear it. This is similar to when UAD updated the converters on the Apollo line. The newer ones were better on paper for a variety of reasons, but most people wouldn't be able to blind test the difference, other than to say one sounds slightly different. This may be different when you start spending money on upper level conversion, but that's a different argument.

I'm guessing the whole reason for the converter change is the chip factory fire. That said, Focusrite probably made some long needed updates to the box based on user feedback. And...if you have need of repairs, owning the newer model might be more flexible versus the chips that could now be harder to get.

If the old version is USB 2.0, I’d expect it to only be useful as an adat slave. Don’t even bother connecting adat out from it.

And really I’d expect the same thing from the new gen from them, because I got burned on 2nd gen scarlett :/ …. Supposedly it’s a usb 2.0 bottleneck and I should have gotten the earlier 1394 FireWire.

Sound samples I’ve heard of the clarett are that it sounds more like RME to me, so RME would be what I’d look into unless the deal was really good and no issues working 24 hours

My scarlett is functional as 8 extra outputs. It can’t handle inputs in any way, it works for a 5-30 minutes then full scale screaming. Nothing like getting into your song, feeling relaxed and then getting blasted at full scale with a world ending siren! Been through the RMA process and run around until I just gave up and let it live as DA. Apparently my story is common, the process is just so dragged out because so many had issues

Haven’t used the Claretts, but I’ve had a few Scarletts here and they were OK for the money. I compared a 3rd Gen 2i2 to my old Apollo Twin MKI and the differences were negligible.

If you just need 8 channels for drums or DI guitars or something, I say pocket the extra cash and grab the original Clarett OctoPre.

But it wouldn’t be my preference to use any of that stuff for money channels, i.e. vocals, stereo bus, piano, acoustic guitar, etc. I think it’s worth having at least two channels of high end AD on hand for those purposes.