AVID PRO TOOLS DUET RECORDING INTERFACE
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AVID PRO TOOLS DUET RECORDING INTERFACE

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NEW HORIZONS

With Win­dows users now invited to take advan­tage of the power of the Apogee Duet, the Avid bun­dle is sure to get a few eye­brows ris­ing. There has been lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion in the high end two-channel inter­face mar­ket for Win­dows users recently, Avid real­ized this to be the case and wanted to offer a high qual­ity inter­face to work with their soft­ware plat­form. For me, this is excit­ing as I am now unbox­ing an Apogee Duet for the first time, hav­ing never pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered doing so. Out of the box, there is only a minor dif­fer­ence between this and the stan­dard Duet with the new ver­sion branded Avid Pro Tools Duet. Other than the dif­fer­ence in the logo printed on the cas­ing, there is no dif­fer­ence to the hard­ware in how it oper­ates or func­tions to the stan­dard Duet.

IN USE

This is a really sleek lit­tle inter­face. Built into a cas­ing that is about the size of many inter­face remote con­trols, you get max­i­mum qual­ity from min­i­mum desk space. A sin­gle rotary encoder that dou­bles as a but­ton is all that adorns the top panel, with the inputs and out­puts com­ing from a rear mounted break­out cable. Two XLR/TRS com­bi­na­tion ins and two TRS outs keep it nice and sim­ple. A head­phone out­put on the front of the unit allows for easy mon­i­tor­ing with­out tan­gling you cables. There are two touch pads on the top panel as well which can be con­fig­ured for a vari­ety of func­tions and four-strip LEDmeter shows lev­els clearly.

For those of you look­ing for a sim­ple and com­pact front end device for Pro Tools, this new release from Avid is cer­tainly worth look­ing into. This almost reminds me of the orig­i­nal Mbox pack­age from years back, but with a greater focus on AD qual­ity so that you get the most form you soft­ware. Just because you only require one or two inputs, does not mean you should have to buy a large inter­face to get high qual­ity. The Avid Pro Tools Duet puts qual­ity together with porta­bil­ity in a very styl­ish box.