I have an Apollo twin duo and like it quite a bit. The conversion quality is acceptably good and the realtime UAD crack is nice to have. Also like the unison plugins. However, getting into UAD crack is not something I’d recommend lightly - the plugins are expensive, the meager plugin instance counts might frustrate someone used to native ITB processing power etc. For me, it made sense to get the Apollo since I had already invested into the platform earlier, and had a usable go-to collection of plugins.
Having said that, UA plugins sound good, but perhaps not significantly better than native anymore.
If you’re on mac, the Apollo line is not bad, but if you’re on windows, I’d recommend waiting a bit to see how people start adopting the USB Apollos. Usually UA tech works reliably, but the early stages of USB interface with UA might be slightly rockier.
I have had my Duet for about 4 years now and before that I had the Maudio firewire 410.
The Duet has very limited I/O which is not a deal breaker for me since my setup is not to big. Duet sounds great I can only recently hear the difference between the pre AD sound Vs the Recorded sound and there is such a subtle difference its not even with mentioning. Its super portable as well. As tsutek stated I wouldn’t recommend UAD unless you budget ahead to buy the plugins. I often look at the UAD and I’m sure its as good or better than the Duet but resisting the urge to not buy at least 10 of the plugins at 300 a pop.
Seems dangerous unless you make a living through your music. If thats the case fill your pants I say.
Anyhow Duet is great perhaps even consider buying one used. I can say its top quality mind you I don’t take mine out of the studio and it would not be hard to tell if it was scuffed and abused if you see one used. I can say once I got the Duet I could hear allot more depth in my tracks, can`t imagine what a super pricy unit would sound like.
if anyone is reading this: after some time with the UH-7000 i can confirm this is a known issue with the power supply which causes random low level noise and break downs.
I have currently emailed tascam and i am looking for a fix.
it is the best dac i have every heard and better than say a rega for listening to music BUT this power issue is killing it.
stay away from it for
now
Used RME Babyface (1st gen) can be found under 300 EUR. Portable with awesome converters and rock solid drivers, expandable if needed via ADAT. I just found it it performs much much better on Linux (latency) compared to Wins although it misses the TotalMix.
i ended up shipping the uh-7000 back to the seller.
why?
it was more stable at 48k, without much of the noise issue. But still i’d love the lushness of 196k without the noise.
still there was noise at 41 and 48 and a shit load of cpu problems
its the best sound card i have ever heard and the preamps are gold but the noise problem (which is well known) is a disgrace.
at any rate, I re purchased an analog 4 and will use that as my soundcard via overbridge
by best recommendation is to get a modern thunderbolt 2.0 interface. the focusrite clarett units with lower input counts fit within that budget and offer very low latency to handle high sample rates.
I am pretty happy with the analog 4 at 24 bit
Has anyone tired a middle range usb cable to increase the sound quality - this usb cable thing seems a myth or scam but I’d be happy to hear any dissenting voices