Apogee’s Symphony
system aims to bring
professional hardware to
users who want to work
with native digital audio
workstations on a Mac,
whether they’re in the
studio with a Mac Pro or
on the road with
a Macbook Pro.
www.soundonsound.com • september 2007
134
on test
computer
recording system
Mark Wherry
A
s computers have become more
powerful over the last few years,
especially with the introduction of
multi-core processors, it really has become
possible to do all of your audio processing,
recording, mixing, and playing virtual
instruments on one system, without the aid
of external processing power. Accordingly,
the market for higher-quality audio
hardware to be used with computer-based
workstations has grown tremendously,
although many of the products available are
targeted at home or project-level situations
rather than the demanding professional.
And by using the word ‘professional’ I’m
talking about those who require a large
number of inputs and outputs (32 or more)
with high-quality analogue converters at
very low latency — and are willing to pay
for such a system.
It used to be that higher-end users
would buy Digidesign’s Pro Tools system,
although often not necessarily for the Pro
Tools software itself. While many popular
products from developers such as MOTU,
Opcode and Steinberg supported Digidesign
hardware directly at one time or another,
perhaps the most popular example is the
way in which pro Logic users would run
Logic as front-end software for the Pro
Tools hardware. And although it’s still
possible to use Pro Tools hardware in
conjunction with Logic, from my own
experience this seems to be a far less
desirable workflow than it was several
years ago.
Other than Pro Tools, if you need a large
number of inputs and outputs (Pro Tools
currently supports up to 160 inputs and
outputs) for a Mac-based audio workstation,
with low latency and quality converters, but
want to stay within the world of your
workstation’s native abilities, there haven’t
Apogee Symphony
pros
• Achieves very low latency while maintaining
native compatibility with Core Audio.
• Apogee’s converters are among the best
available.
• The VBus channel routing adds a feature that’s
sorely missing in many native audio
workstations.
• Symphony Mobile provides all the functionality
of a single Symphony PCI card.
cons
• If you want to take advantage of the Symphony
system’s feature set, but require more digital I/O
instead of high-quality analogue converters,
having to buy Apogee’s converters can work out
expensive.
• Fully understanding how all the parts of the
Symphony system work together can take a bit
of time.
summary
Apogee’s Symphony is an impressive system that
truly brings professional-quality audio converters,
combined with good performance and low
latency, to Core Audio-based applications on both
desktop and mobile platforms.
Apogee Symphony
Audio Interface System
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