APOGEE ENSEMBLE THUNDERBOLT AUDIO INTERFACE

UP FRONT

For an inter­face that crams so much onto a sin­gle rack unit, the front panel is kept sparsely pop­u­lated and very well pre­sented. Two jog wheels allow you to con­trol input and out­put lev­els with a range of fixed and assign­a­ble but­tons. What I really like is the addi­tion of two gui­tar inputs on the front of the unit. Sure, this isn’t a break­through idea, we have all seen that before, but when they are paired up with a cou­ple of re-amp out­puts, you know the design team at Apogee have nailed it with this unit. It’s such a sim­ple idea, yet so clev­erly exe­cuted. This will change the way many stu­dios work with gui­tar record­ing. You can cap­ture the clean gui­tar sound up front and send the sig­nal back out into an amp of your choice to be recorded also. You can then switch the amps around and send the same clean sig­nal at the same level that would have come from your gui­tar orig­i­nally, back into those amps to find the tone that works for you when it comes to the mix.

AROUND THE BACK

This is where Apogee seems to have defied the laws of physics by plac­ing more phys­i­cal inputs con­nec­tions onto a sin­gle rack unit than you would have deemed pos­si­ble. You get 8 XLR micro­phone inputs, four of which have com­bi­na­tion XLR/TRS con­nec­tions, and two send and return points on TRS con­nec­tors as well. Work clock, SP/DIF and two lots of ADAT ins and outs are all there for tak­ing care of dig­i­tal inter­fac­ing and adding track count from exter­nal pre­amps. The sneaky design aspect is that there are only two gen­uine ana­logue out­puts for your mon­i­tors on the rear of the unit. It’s a very clever move on Apogee’s behalf, sav­ing space for inputs instead. You have the option of adding a fur­ther 8 out­puts with an optional break­out cable, but many users will sim­ply not find the need for this.

In all, this is an inter­face that ticks all the boxes and deliv­ers results at an incred­i­ble speed. The audio qual­ity has to be heard to really under­stand and latency isn’t going to be an issue. This is a well-designed, sleek look­ing unit that deliv­ers what it promises and stream­lines work­flow for larger home stu­dio and pro­fes­sional users. I think I want one.