Antelope ZEN GO Synergy Core - Audio Interface Review (real-time effect processing?)

real-time audio effects processing and premium sound quality that's what antelope promises with the xengo synergy core audio interface let's check it out hey julian krauss here and this is the antelope audio zen go synergy core and this is currently the most affordable way to get access to the real-time audio effects from antelope called synergy core effects these effects are being processed right inside the audio interface with the dedicated hardware which results in an imperceivable latency this comes in handy whenever you need your audio processor right away be it for online streaming guitar amp simulation or for quick project turnaround times additionally you get to hear the effects in real time while monitoring so you'll know how your recording will turn out but before i go deeper into the synergy core effects let's have a look at the hardware first probably the first thing that grabs your attention is the lcd which shows the audio level for your in and outputs as well as other useful information like sample rate clock source and lock i think this display is really nice to have as it gives you a quick overview of your signal levels without needing to check your daw and antelope has even marked at the audio levels in db which is greatly appreciated now this display has one downside which was very unexpected but i will get into that a little later when we have a look at the audio measurements for now let's focus on the controls and there aren't actually that many with the three buttons you can select the function first and then control it with the big encoder knob so for example you can press this button to control the gain for the preamp and then turn the knob to increase or decrease the gain the gain is also shown in the display in this way you can make precise adjustments and also easily recall a certain gain setting because you only have one big knob to control all the functions of the interface it can sometimes be a bit finicky to set certain settings with the hardware controls but on the plus side all settings can be set in the software as well so i ended up using the physical controls primarily as a volume control for the headphone and monitor output and used the software to change all the other settings now on the front of the interface you can find two quarter inch headphone outputs these outputs have individual volume controls and you can even send a different monitor mix to each of them which is really nice especially when you record with another person on the back you can find the rest of the connections starting on the left you can find the two xlr and trs combo inputs this is where you connect microphones line level devices or instruments and for that the quarter inch jack connection is switchable between a line or high z input in the middle you can find the outputs of the zen go you get one pair of balanced trs outputs and a set of rca connectors if you want to use an unbalanced connection further to the right you can find the spdif in and split f output with this bit of input you can extend the inputs by an additional two channel on the far right the zengo features two usb type-c connectors for all the testing in this video i used the usb connection to connect the zen go to my windows 10 machine let's shortly talk about the build quality the interface is completely out of metal and it feels very sturdy the big encoder is made out of metal as well and it turns easily but i do have a complaint with it it makes a really loud clicking noise when turning the encoder has small notches every few degrees so you already have haptic feedback when a setting is changed and the loud clicking is just unnecessary and it got a bit annoying when i had to change a setting between two extremes i think a silent knob would have been a better choice here now normally in my reviews i take a look inside the device but the zengo has a warranty sticker on it and there's simply no way i can get past that with that out of the way here you can see the inner workings big shout out to all my patrons which make it much more comfortable for me to disregard any warranty sticker at its heart at the zen go got an imx rt 1052 processor which is based on the arm cortex m7 core you can find another atmel processor and interestingly three seroslogic 43198 digital to analog converters these chips are quite expensive and i'm surprised to see three of them in the zen go probably one for the main outputs and one for each of the two headphone outputs the analog to digital conversion is handled by a ti burr brown pcm 1840 ok let's have a quick look at the driver and real-time effects i want to point out that in order to use the xengo you have to register it and for that you have to create an account on antelope's website i am personally not a big fan of being forced into signing up to use an audi interface but what can you do so i created an account and promptly got sent an ad thanks antelope on a more positive note the driver instantly checked for updates and let me install the newest firmware for the zen go after that you can click on start control panel and the interface starts to bounce happily the starting time is relatively long about 20 seconds so i highly suggest to keep this panel open as long as you use the interface once opened you can have a very precise control over the monitoring mixer for the main out and the first headphone output and another independent mix for the second headphone output as these controls are all digital there will be some amount of latency created for the direct monitoring i measured the latency and it shouldn't come as a surprise that this is affected by the sample rate of the interface i'm very happy to report that with 48 kilohertz the latency was only 0.5 milliseconds and with 192 kilohertz it was even lower at around 0.2 milliseconds this is with no effects applied and this amount of latency is imperceivably low which is really nice to see but the real question is what happens to the latency when you use the synergy core effects in short they of course add a bit of latency but this is still so low that there is no way to perceive this and thus i have no problem calling them real-time effects i made the measurements with 48 kilohertz as this is a worst case scenario the simple effects like clear q and powergate only increase the latency by about 0.1 milliseconds and more demanding effects like the guitar m sims and vintage mic preamps increase the latency by about 0.3 milliseconds each and these times will add up so for example if you add an eq a guitar cabinet sim and a vintage compressor the latency will be around one millisecond which is imperceptible and that's the real strength of the synergy core effects as they do provide you with a proper real-time audio processing all the effects which are not part of the synergy core effect library of course have to be calculated inside the pc and for that the round trip latency becomes important this is the time it takes an audio interface to output the signal and then record it again here you can see the times i got with 48 kilohertz and different buffer sizes and here with 192 kilohertz the rtl is heavily affected by the used sample rate and buffer size so the achieved times very much depend on your pc and the settings you're currently working on but i have to say the zen go delivered an above average latency performance which can be improved by about one more millisecond by disabling the safe mode in the azure driver but let's go back to the synergy core effects with the send go you get 37 effects to start with and if you want you can buy additional effects from the synergy core library the 37 effects include things like eq gates different types of compressors and guitar amps and cabinet simulators and of course each effect can be tweaked further so there is a lot of customization of the sound possible now i've been raving about the performance of the synergy core effects until now but they aren't always perfect first of all i noticed that if the audio clips inside an applied effect because for example you used some gain there is no way to recover the signal in a subsequent effect this is normally possible with 32-bit float processing and i'm a bit surprised that this is not the case here so you have to be a bit more careful when using gain in the effects i did encounter another problem when initially booting up the interface in this case the compression and gate effect would create a considerable amount of noise when i changed any setting in the effect the noise immediately went away and then it was fine again speaking of bugs when i made my first measurements of the headphone output the provided power was very low and i thought i had a defective unit but later that day a firmware update was released and this completely eliminated the problem so the software is not perfect but it is nice to see that antelope is constantly working on improving things before we move on i want to highlight that the zengo has a loopback feature which allows you to record the audio of your pc as well as the inputs of the device this can be very handy in situations where you want to record or stream your computer's audio in addition to for example the audio from your microphone okay enough about the features of the interface let's have a look at the audio quality with some measurements i made here you can see the frequency response of the mic input and this should be as flat as possible to not change the recorded sound the response is relatively flat in the audible range but it does definitely fall off at the extremes at 20 hertz it's down by about 1.5 db and at 20 000 hertz it's down around 0.8 db to be honest this isn't a big deal and you wouldn't have noticed if i hadn't told you but the zengo could have arguably had a slightly flatter frequency response as always i checked the distortion of the microphone input with a typical microphone level signal and as you can see with the recorded signal close to the full scale the distortion products are around 100 decibels below the signal that's an excellent performance the dynamic range of the microphone input is also important because with a high dynamic range you can leave yourself more headroom while recording without introducing additional noise my particular unit comes in at 110.2 dba which is very good that said for an interface in this price range i would have expected a bit more as the zen go is outperformed by quite a bit more inexpensive interfaces in this regard okay let's check out the pre and performance of the zen go i'm currently using a shure sm7b to record myself and the big downside of the sm7b is that it has a very low output level which accentuates the preamp noise so this is pretty much a worst case scenario for the preamps i'm going to be quiet for a few seconds so you can have a listen to the noise law of the setup as you could hear the noise floor is quite low but there is a hint more noise compared to other audi interfaces that i recently reviewed to quantify this i measured the so called equivalent input noise which lets you directly compare the preamp noise of different interfaces my zen go came in with 126.5 dbua weighted while this is a pretty good value and you're definitely able to make low noise recordings with the dynamic microphones the zengo is slightly behind the majority of interfaces in terms of preamp noise here's a small comparison so naturally you would ask the question do you need a cloud lifter or fat head well from a gain perspective no you might have to max out the gain on the zen go but then it reaches a comfortable recording level even with low sensitive dynamic mics in terms of preamp noise i also think that you do not necessarily need an inline preamp but if you want to get the lowest possible preamp noise a cloud lifter or fat head could help you to lower the noise by about four more decibels which depending on your recording situation might make a noticeable difference let's have a look at the line level input performance the frequency response is similar to the mic inputs and it too shows a slight roll off at the lower and upper limit of human hearing as these deviations are only below a decibel it is still a pretty decent frequency response in terms of distortion the line level input performs very well only showing some harmonic content around 100 decibels below the signal which is negligibly low the dynamic range is of course very important for the line level input as it shows us the noise performance of the input the zengo comes in at 110.5 dba which like the mic input is very good but could have arguably been slightly higher for a device in this category overall the line level input performance is very good and i want to point out that the zen go can take a signal of up to 19 dbv which is definitely in the realm of a professional line level signal speaking of professional line level let's have a look what comes out of the main outputs on the zen go starting out with the frequency response you can see that this is very much perfect as this is a flat line across the chart even outside the human hearing range the response stays completely flat and it doesn't get much better than that in terms of distortion the zengo also performs excellent and produces only an inaudible amount of distortion with 4 volts i measured a thd plus n of around -103 db which i consider to be a transparent performance the line level outputs can produce a strong output level of 17.5 dbv which i would consider as a professional line level signal this allows the zen go to achieve an incredible high dynamic range of 128.4 dba weighted for the main outputs and with the rca outputs at 2 volts you will still get 124.5 dba that's really good and this ensures that you won't hear any noise from the main outputs but there is a catch when i first made my measurements the dynamic range was noticeably lower because of interference there were quite a lot of spurious tones which were also stronger on one channel and i went on a small investigation to track down the root cause it turns out that when changing the brightness of the lcd it has an impact on the interference and you can see this here as soon as the brightness setting hits 100 the interference disappears again so it's the dimming of the lcd backlight that causes this problem i want to add that the interference is quite low and there is hardly any chance that you will hear this but it's still best to set the lcd screen to either 0 or 100 to ensure that there is no negative impact on your sound next up headphone output performance as with all my other reviews i've condensed all my measurements into this table where you can directly compare the different devices the measurements are also color coded to give you an indication on how well an interface performs let's start with the frequency response which is extremely flat and to like the main output pretty much as good as it gets the output impedance of a headphone output should be as low as possible so that the sound isn't influenced by the impedance of the headphones sadly the zengo has quite a high output impedance of 27 ohms the output impedance is erased artificially by a resistor in series with the headphone output this is an easy way to limit the current flow but it comes at the expense of possible frequency response deviations when low impedance headphones are used for an interface in this price range and this is a big no-go and antelope should have invested a bit more into the design here for critical listening you want to keep the frequency variations due to the output impedance to a minimum and for that i recommend to use headphones of at least 150 ohms with these in go on the other hand it's nice to see that the zengo can drive higher impedance headphones as it delivers a decent amount of power into voltage hungry 600 ohm headphones in terms of distortion the headphone output performs very well and it is nice to see that with low and high impedance headphones the distortions are easily kept to an imperceivable level the noise performance of the headphone output is also excellent regardless whether you set the volume control to a minimum or a typical listening level even with more sensitive headphones and there should be no chance that you'll hear any noise from the headphone outputs the channel balance is also excellent because the outputs are digitally controlled so even if you listen at very low volumes the left and right side of your headphones will always play equally loud the crosstalk should be as low as possible to not leak any audio from one channel into the other this is important to get a good stereo separation and hear the zen go delivers an average performance with about -50 db which to be honest is still fine so with the exception of the relatively high output impedance the headphone output of the zen go performs very nicely now let's wrap this all up overall i think the zengo is a good interface which sets itself apart with the synergy core real-time effects and a very high degree of customizability via the software still there are a few things that could be improved first of all for the price i would have liked to see a slightly higher dynamic range on the inputs and a better pre noise performance a lower output impedance for the headphone output would also be greatly appreciated i would also like to see a shortened loading time of the control panel and of course i want the few bugs that i found to be fixed this should be easily possible with a firmware update and there's a really good chance that this might have already been taken care of when you're watching this video on a more positive note the zen go shows inaudible amounts of distortion for all audio in and outputs and a pretty good amount of output power to drive even more demanding high impedance headphones having the ability to set individual mixes for the two headphone outputs and additional features like loopback add to the overall versatility of the zengo of course the synergy core effects are one of the main features of the zengo and in my opinion they are implemented very well giving you a true real-time performance and i think that these will be one of the biggest deciding factors for this interface that's it for now like share and subscribe and i will see you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Julian Krause

Views: 46,388

Rating: 4.9418373 out of 5

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Id: jBu_WfUnH4c

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021