Thunderbolt Option Card

Once you go thunderbolt you never go firewire

I used to have a ton of nightmarish issues with firewire. Always getting dropped out of sessions in Protools. Then rebooting over and over again. Also the good old days of the snap, crackle, pop latency issues are long gone.

I am not really not sure what all the negative reviews here are all about but I have seriously seen a major difference in speed and performance gains. Then again I have a pretty powerful custom computer I built with an 10 core i7, 64gb of ram, solid state hard drives and a Nvidia 1080ti graphics card. I think it might be enough to make even a mac a little jealous ;)

This is a must for low Buffer Size Recording

The Thunderbolt Option Card may be the most excited I've ever gotten over an accessory! I was having an issue using the firewire port with the Apollo Quad recording at a Buffer size of 64 in Ableton Live. For some reason the firewire port would kick my cpu to 70% with just one LA-2A Silver. My computer is very powerful with an i7 and 16 gbs of ram and a solild state drive so the issue wasn't the speed or strength of my computer. When I installed the thunderbolt port, my cpu was at 13% with just one LA-2A Silver.

Good news, all new Apollos you buy ship with this now.

Finally my problems with UAD plugs went away

Well the reviews are not great, but man has my system been stable since receiving the thunderboltcard. I had errors all day long with the stock firewire connection, but ever since I god the thunderbolt card, I have not had ONE SINGLE DROPOUT!

So I am guessing this the Apollo soon will come with the thunderbolt as stock, because it will really save UA a lot of hours on technichal support :)