This month also finds us at Sphere Studios, the venue for a demo of Universal Audio’s latest interface, Apollo, hosted by the guys at Source Distribution.
The interface features 8 analogue and 10 digital inputs, and 14 analogue and 10 digital outputs. With built-in UAD-2 DSP Acceleration, providing less that 2-ms latency for the UAD-2 plug-ins, Apollo brings all those lovely sounds right to the tracking stage of recording. With its onboard processing, Apollo mimics the flow of analogue processing allowing low-latency processing and monitoring before recording to ‘tape’.
All on-board settings can then be recalled in your DAW of choice, recreating the exact sound that was used at the tracking stage – transfering settings from the Apollo to the UA plug-ins is a simple case of copy-and-paste; it would have been nice to see an easier way to transfer the settings from a full channel strip but I suspect this is a limitation set by most DAWs and something we won’t see change any time soon.
Demonstrations of the interface were followed by some fairly heated debate about the possible pitfalls of the product, but let’s not forget what the interface does well for a fairly modest price!
For a studio packed with so much of the kit that the UAD plug-ins emulate, I was left craving an A/B comparison of the Apollo, but night was fast approaching and we had to say our goodbyes only too soon.
Thank you again to Wes from UA, Howard and Alex at Source for organising the event and the guys at Sphere for having us.
