Is This The Best Desktop Audio Interface?

well hello everybody I am Jay Leonard J and today I'm going to tell you exactly why I think that this little unit over here might be the best desktop interface for your home project studio well a ladies and gentlemen today we got something pretty special on the bench today I've been troubleshooting this thing for about a month now and I will have to say this is probably the best desktop audio interface that you could possibly buy right now this is the antelope audio Zen tour synergy core who is this thing for well this is if you're a producer that is traveling a lot you like to work for motely but you need power you need flexibility or if you're a producer that maybe has a little bit of limited space to work with this is going to give you the power of all your rackmount audio interfaces in a nice streamlined portable enclosure what I'm going to do today is I'm gonna give you four reasons why I think this thing is the choice that you should make if you're looking for a small desktop audio interface and what I'm gonna do after that isn't gonna tell you maybe a couple of the things to look out for if you're thinking about buying this but I'm definitely keeping this thing this is I'm ripping out the stuff in the studio right now I'm swishing as a live audio and let's go find out why in my home studio life I've had four distinct eras I've had my starting off point which is my mode to eight to eight and then I went Apogee Ensemble and then I went Universal Audio Apollo and right now I am in the Army in the YouTube studio it's a ucx and then in my recording studio it's au FX the number one thing I missed the most when I switched out of Universal Audio was access to all the really wonderful DSP plugins that had built right in it really made my workflow so much faster and it's wonderful to have that power right back in this unit is a wonderful collection of preamps compressors eq's guitar our absence that really make life so much easier for me when I want to track my vocals I can create wonderful professional sounding effects chains with no latency if I want to get guitar tones I don't have to load up my dog or a VST loader I could do it all in the box and finally when I'm mixing I don't have to put so much load on the plugins in my computer I can offload a lot of that work to this unit over here so it's really really handy stuff and makes life so much easier now one thing to know though is when you use the FX plugins it's a little bit different than the Universal Audio one in terms of using it in your DAW you actually have to route these the same way you would route an outboard piece of gear it's a little bit of an extra step but just make it as a preset and you don't have to ever think about it again or if you want to go the universal audio route just have it as an insert you can get the a FX - da plug-in as well up next is conversion and clocking one thing about me I love using outboard preamps it's a big part of my workflow I have both ones with hardware inserts as well as a DAT I just like the dynamic range you get with them I like the character that you get with them and so when I'm looking for an audio interface really really important for me to have great converters and rock-solid clocks and that was actually something I loved about my old Apogee ensemble wonderful converters on that little thing and this little unit man really solid stuff just from a technical standpoint when you compare this unit to anything in this price range or this size I haven't seen anything from a spec standpoint that has a better dynamic range or noise threshold than the ones built into here and obviously when it comes to clocking ayatollah audio was known first for its master clocks and that technology goes into all their boxes no jitter rock solid performance obviously just a wonderful thing to have that makes this unit just fantastic usually these like tabletop interfaces are made with the idea that only one person's using it like a singer-songwriter or like a producer making beats in this little home studio and that's why they usually have maybe at most four inputs and four outputs one headphone jack this thing was definitely made with collaboration in mind there is eight physical inputs on this thing you could use Heisey with four of them you could use a mic with four of them you could expand eight channels with your eight at ins-and-outs you got eight lineouts spit if if you're using an amp modeler or a keyboard it has a built-in talkback mic that way you don't have to give up one of your inputs this thing actually has a pretty nifty touchscreen interface and two built-in reamp boxes so that means I could actually just track my guitar tones direct to the board and then re app it with the real thing down the road at a later date so so handy last but not least this is the feature that really just took me over the edge when it comes to the Zen tour most people ask me why I switch from Universal Audio to rme and that reason really comes down to the routing matrix in the control panel I love the rme routing matrix it has so much wonderful options I can do I can patch things in so many creative ways and it's really really powerful but this Zen tour really takes that routing ability to 11 I can do things with the routing matrix and the control panel that I haven't really seen in any interface ever and it's just incredibly powerful incredibly intuitive and incredibly versatile obviously with this thing you have a really powerful metering section here your effects panel for different sub mixes you can create but the magic here right here this routing panel I can use some really really crazy things with this really taking away the need for any outboard hardware and just talking about this is its own video in itself so what I'm going instead is I'm just gonna give you an example of how I can utilize this routing matrix in my workflow so what I have here is I have my Fender Telecaster and I have it just plugged into preamp number one so I'm just gonna change the name of preamp number one to dry because it's my dry guitar tone and I'm just gonna drag it into my mixer here to channel three so we can hear what it sounds like there it is showing up [Music] not bad for some dry guitar tones right but that's not where the fun starts let's go create two different amps I want to create like a stereo guitar track okay so I'm gonna get that dry sound and I'm going to put it into to a FX channel so I'm going for my drawing one and I'm gonna put my dry in the other a FX 1 and a FX 2 if i go into my effects here i can see that a FX 1 is a Fender blackface amp and a FX 2 is like a martially kind of thing so let's just rename that I'm gonna call this bf4 blackface and then I'm gonna call the other one m4 Marshall alright so let's drag this into my mix channel and see what this sounds like and you can tell they have them stereo linked already and pans all of a sudden I got stereo Marshall and fender sounds [Music] awesome so now I got my dry signal and I got a stereo guitar track but that's not where we're gonna stop I'm going to go back into the routing matrix and I'm gonna put this dry sound into the reamp out and that reamp out is gonna go directly into this Benson chimera now since we're using the reamp all the impedances are gonna be completely correct so it's gonna sound just like me plugging my guitar into this amp and if you look I have the amp miked with this little LeWitt mic and this focus right and I have that going into preamp number two so I'm gonna call this Benson and let's put that Benson into our chain of sounds over here this is the Benson amp [Music] awesome awesome now again we're not done yet say I you know when I record a mic into my app there's a couple things I like to do I like to put certain effects on it so I'm gonna get my Benson out and I'm gonna put it into a FX 3 look here in the effects panel I have a FX 3 going into a little bit of a low-cut a little bit of a high cut and a tape emulator now all of a sudden I have another sound option with baked and EQ and tape effects [Music] and just like that really really simply I'm able to create five separate guitar tracks I have my black face and my Marshall sounds with the AF X my dry tone and my Benson mic and the Benson with effects and if you look at it in my dog here I have all tracks all five of them being recorded separately so if anything doesn't work out I can always reamp again my dry sound that is some powerful powerful routing stuff going on over here and one of the main reasons why I'm switching to antelope audio well as you can tell I am really really on board with everything that's going on in this unit I think this is just fantastic but there are three things that did stand out to me for all of you people considering picking one of these up right now I'm using version two point two point four into a PC running Windows 10 and I'm giving you those specs because I feel like a lot of this is software based so it might not actually be an issue by the time you get this unit the first thing that comes to mind is the overall output level I find that this unit is just a little bit quieter than all my other audio interfaces maybe it's the software thing or maybe it's what they have to do to get to converters to the quality that they are but I am writing that fader a little higher than I normally would if you are tracking really quietly and you're having trouble hearing yourself one little tip I do is I'll actually just get two of that input and I'll just link them in the mixer to come up with one double volume fader speaking of the faders I'm not really sold on the taper of the faders it's not this gradual smooth transition from quiet to loud it's just a lot of quiet and a ton of loud like right at the upper end of things so when I'm trying to get my monitoring levels sometimes it could be a little bit finicky to get it in that right spot one thing that I think definitely would be fixed in the software and last but not least the last thing that comes to mind is the plug-in the plug-in to use it as an insert in your DAW as opposed to patching it like an outboard piece of gear for the afx I wish that they had one for Windows users using the USB right now it's only for Mac and it's so useful especially I was doing a mix and I forgot to save my Maya settings in my control panel in this end tour and so when I went back to my session I was like I was really messed up so I wish that I had that plug-in available to me obviously probably by the time you see this video they would have fixed that already but it's definitely one thing to keep in mind well that is it that is the demo thank you all so much for watching and yeah if you're curious the rme ucx is coming out of the youtube studio this is the official audio interface for the youtube studio in fact you know what I want to get like the big rack unit from my project studio as well and maybe a discrete floor for my home you know what I'm getting ahead of myself I'm just getting excited please subscribe to the page if you haven't already and check the links in the description below support me on patreon if you can my question for the subscribers today is when you're going for an audio interface what is the number one feature you're looking for is that the drivers the converters the i/o please write it down in the description or not description in the comment section below that being said I guess I'll see you all soon take care and good bye

Channel: JayLeonardJ

Views: 52,892

Rating: 4.456604 out of 5

Keywords: jay leonard, jay leonard juatco, leonard juatco, jayleonard, jayleonardj, jay leonard jay, jleonardj, antelope audio, zentour, zen tour, synergy core, audio interface, desktop, portable, spdif, adat, reamp, touch screen, touchscreen, tabletop, table top, universal audio, apollo, twin, apogee symphony, demo, unboxing, tutorial, best audio interface, rme, focusrite, apogee, motu, rundown, rig rundown, antelope audio drivers, orion, goliath, discrete 8, discrete 4, audient, dsp, afx, afx2daw, pros and cons

Id: iVT1UQekd5o

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020