For this month’s installment of Beat Artillery, I’m turning my attention to the new Apogee Mac-based Audio Interface that was just released called Quartet. Basically… Quartet is in-between the Duo and the Ensemble in i/o and has a price tag of around $1,300.
If you’re not familiar with Apogee, basically they’re the ones who everyone trusted for a/d and d/a sound quality back when ProTools hardware sounded like garbage. Even today, they’re still renowned for having some of the best converters for really accurate digital sound recording and reproduction. That’s their main selling point when you talk to most people.
However, what I think is pretty cool about this device is that it can act as a 5.1 mixing system (with its 6 available analog outputs) or as a monitor switcher between 3 different sets of monitors. No need for a separate hardware switcher! (I didn’t trust any of the switchers on the market when I was looking for one years ago so I had someone build me a custom, completely passive speaker switcher with really high quality transformers.)
One thing that I’ve never been able to wrap my head around is the advantages and disadvantages of choosing one connectivity protocol over another… in this case, USB2 vs USB3 vs FireWire 400 vs FireWire 800 vs Thunderbolt. The Apogee Quartet is USB2, and Apogee claims that this is only because their technology allows for them to use such little bandwidth of the USB2 capabilities. And that putting any other type of connectivity on this box would be a waste of money and would only jack the cost up. My concern is really with track count. I’d really love to see some research on how the varying connectors effect track count and your computer’s ability to process and spit out audio. I haven’t done too much searching, but if reading audio from a FireWire or Thunderbolt drive is faster than USB2 (say), then why wouldn’t the audio interface’s connection make much of a difference??? They claim latency is near non-existent, but I’m more concerned with being able to play back 100 audio tracks without buffering.
But I guess that’s why I’m a producer and not a scientist.
I heard that in Ableton Live, aggregate audio diecves using the Duet are producing too much latency. Have you heard anything about this? Either there’s a lag between the System Audio and the Duet (firewire) or the two simply add up to unusable measurements of latency-I can’t tell you cause I haven’t tried it. Does creating an aggregate audio device put more effort in the CPU?I have an alternate Duet set-up whereby I’ve set-up two mono outputs in the live audio preferences pane, and omitted a grouped Stereo output. I simply put my Master through Output 1 and my cue through output 2 (and make sure the solo buttons, audiofinder etc are set to cue ). For really stereophonic information, I think I’m actually even safer to keep things mono in a club because proximity effects wouldn’t make much sense for folks standing in different locations of a club, and many PAs are set-up in mono to begin with.My follow up question to you-when ableton states that selecting and deselecting i/o channels will effect CPU load, do they also count the mono’s and stereo pairs as separate channels?Thanks,James
tbh… i’ve never used the Duet in a live setting, only studio…. so no, I’ve not encountered your issue. Re: stereo situations in a LIVE setting, most larger format arrays are in mono to eliminate any issues with phasing to the listener… so you’re safer sending mono and making sure that you are not having phasing issues internally.
for your 2nd question….. stereo channels vs mono channels and how they are processed varies between DAWs. Always remember that if you apply a stereo plug-in to a channel, that the information that has to be processed doubles. Same applies to stereo tracks with stereo audio files versus mono tracks with mono audio files.