Universal Audio has just announced the new Volt recording interface series featuring classic analog tone shaping capabilities. The Volt lineup combines pristine audio quality with versatile effects in a compact package that’s perfect for recording music, podcasts and livestreaming anywhere you want.
There are five interfaces in the Volt series; the Volt 1 ($139), Volt 2 ($189), Volt 176 ($249), Volt 276 ($299) and Volt 476 ($369). Before we break down each release, watch our new video featuring an overview of the line and a walkthrough of a song completely tracked with a Volt interface and its companion software.
Some interesting and affordable additions to their lineup. The preamps look nice, with switchable vintage tube emulation mode of the 610, and pretty cool that some of them have a selectable analog 1176 circuit built-in.
If it’s essentially the UAD 610 pre and 1176 plugins then that’s pretty nice because those two plugins are excellent (I use them all the time). Sounds like it might be presets only though… clearly designed as the gateway drug to an Apollo.
I see, I’ve been so conditioned by UA labelling loads of their emulations as “analog” that I assumed this was the same. Especially given the relatively low price.
Looked for something similar last year and decided against it. Mainly because this whole USP around „authentic“ colouration seems to be fairly bloated. Bought a Motu M2 instead, which is rock solid and has good Mac support ever since. So… M4 might be interesting for you?
You mean passing on sysex messages from a computer through the din ports? Sure, as long as the device you’re sending to is capable of receiving sysex. If you mean as a standalone I doubt it, I think the only standalone functionality is being able to use the preamps/compressor and audio routing without a computer which I have done successfully, but I’ve never had any luck using it for midi apart from with a computer and I did do a sysex OS update to my digitakt so I know it works for that purpose. The reason I think not standalone is that I looked into whether I could use mine as a usb midi host and all the info I came up with pointed to no.
I wanted: Low price, high quality sound, 4 ins, MIDI & stability.
Happy with this device, because everything works as it should. No driver issues or weirdo stuff, both on OSX & Windows 11. It also routes audio to my monitors without a laptop (nice for jamming).
My only issue is the lack of interface-software. Aka: there is 0 audio-card software (no volume controls in OSX!). Because of this lack I installed the (free) eqMac app (OSX) and wow, this piece of software is amazing!
