First Look: Universal Audio Apollo 16 Launch at VKLA

May 6th, 2013 by Janice Brown

Last week, VKLA hosted the West Coast premier of Universal Audio’s new Apollo 16 interface, presented through a live demonstration by Fab Dupont and an interview with Universal Audio founder Bill Putnam, Jr.

As we previously reported, the Apollo 16 is a 24-bit/192 kHz audio interface with 16×16 analog I/O (double that of the original Apollo) and a built-in UAD-2 Quad DSP card. Shipping in Q2 of 2013, it will have a street price of $2,999.

SonicScoop’s LA correspondent, producer/engineer Bo Boddie, was in attendance and shared some of his impressions of the Apollo 16, having seen it in action:

“Fab had two Apollo 16s and an expansion chassis (that’s 16 DSP chips total) running on a MacBook Pro. He pulled up a [Banda Magda] session he’d been working on that was around 130-140 tracks, and played us different aspects of the session by unhiding more and more of it as he went and talking a bit about each component. For instance, he’d recorded a string quartet at Avatar for the session – tracked in the live room with the Apollos on the laptop – and then overdubbed them a few times to get that big “orchestral” sound.

While he was taking us through this session, he kept the CPU meter up on the computer the whole time, and that never went over 30%. And the session was using an enormous number of plugins – about 140 total – every single track had some sort of UAD plugin on it. So, here he is running a session natively with 130+ tracks, with plugins on every single track, and he’s barely cresting 30% of your computer’s power. That was really impressive.”

Fab also demoed the Apollo’s zero-input latency by tracking a musician live for the group. Laena Geronimo (Raw Geronimo, Dante Vs. Zombies) overdubbed bass into the session via some classic UAD plugins. Bo added: “Since all the processing can be done on the input side with the plugins, you’re able to get the sound you want using these great plugins on the way in, and have this latency-free tracking experience… even with a session that large. That was exciting to see!”

See some photos from the event below! (Photo Credit: Shevy Shovlin and Brian Ulrich). And click for more on the Apollo 16.

sponsored