Apollo Solo

I bought a Sphere DLX microphone last year and up until now I’ve been disappointed with it and wished I had bought a simple good quality condenser mic. I bought a Focusrite ISA at the same time before I realised the DLX needed a stereo input. I have a YSMAHA DM3D desk with DANTE so I plugged the mic into that and use the ISA for analog processing via DANTE. All good? Well no! I assumed that my 62 year old ears just weren’t hearing the subtle difference between the models. I compared the SM57 model with a real SM57 and tried it off axis and it sounded identical. I got my partner to press the buttons and tried to guess which was which and it wasn’t easy. I have a UAD Satellite and assumed (wongly) that CONSOLE would allow me to use it for low latency monitoring and in the end I was running the Sphere mic monitoring on another computer in Main Stage to get near zero latency but it was still bugging me that the models sounded so similar. I travel a lot and I have more interfaces than I know what to do with. The easiest way to record vocals on the road is to use a Zoom recorder as an interface. But having recently bought some very nice Sennheiser headphones and with a rats nest solution to my guitar needs I decided I obviously needed an Apollo Solo. It’s neat and looks pretty and it covers my on road needs. And I figured I could use the computer that’s running Main Stage as a DANTE end point for Supertone Clear and Vocoflex as they hammer my processor and slow down my sessions.…

I've had this interface for about 3 years now and up until last month I loved it (a 5 star product). The UA Console was easy to use and allowed me track my songs with great flexibility.

However, a couple of months ago there was a firmware upgrade and the UA Console software was re-written and needed re-installing...

First issue was that my virus checker wouldn't allow the new installer to work. Even after explicitly allowing the processes through the firewall, the only way I could install the new software was by temporarily disabling the virus checker. Evidence of poor testing with real-world devices. But not a show-stopper.

However, I then went to track a new song last week and my usual method of recording a dry vocal on LINE1, but then sending LINE1 to AUX1 and applying reverb so that I could also record AUX1 onto a separate wet track in my DAW mysteriously stopped working. After following the support chatbots advice (same advice constantly repeated, despite me telling it had already done it) with it still not working, I raised a support ticket, but I haven't yet had a reply.

I've then also investigated on the web and it appears that the routing options inside the UA Console to allow AUX1 out to the DAW is not available on USB devices!! Net result, a significant degradation of the usability of the device for USB users.

As a result, because of the premium cost of this device and the fact that UA seem to be becoming a less dependable company to deal with (also recently…

It's a very handy portable interface with high quality audio converters. for me there is two issues, one is the buss power, it's what made me choose this interface among the other Apollo's but it's not working very good if you put the laptop to sleep it crashes protools and Ableton. UAD should solve this! it's not a cheap interface and I thing it should work better. Also very annoying is to have to download all the UAD plugins, it takes a lot of space from the drive. It should be possible to just download the ones you own