The Dim button lowers the monitor output level, the Mute switch kills it entirely, and the Mono button switches between stereo and mono output for playback system compatibility checking. The Talk button activates the talkback mic (the tiny hole below the knob), which can be sent to the outputs of your choice for control room communication or quick recording of notes and cues. In Monitor mode, four of the Option buttons - which weren’t used at all by MkI - now come into play, necessitating the addition of a new row of icons to the LED strip, which has been made a bit deeper to accommodate them. Other than that, the MkII sees a refinement of its studio workflow with the addition of a talkback mic and front panel access to a few of the monitoring functions of the Console software (see It’s not just the hardware). So, whereas the Duo can handle 18 stereo instances of the Pultec EQP-1A Legacy, for example, before conking out, the Quad manages hosts up to 36 of the buggers. The original Twin maxed out at the two-core Duo version, but the MkII can be had in Solo, Duo and Quad editions, each doubling the power and, consequently, UAD plugin counts of the one below. More dramatically, the MkII has been granted a massive boost to the onboard DSPs. That aside, seamlessly designed, utterly rock solid and very easy to use, Console is as high-quality as audio interface control/mixer apps get. The plugins browser that pops up when an insert point is clicked shows the entire UAD range by default, with no discrimination between those you own and those you don’t, and although you can ‘Hide’ the latter in the Console Settings, it feels like there should be an option to just filter them all in and out in the browser itself - there are a lot of them, after all. As well as the auxiliary buses and main Monitor bus, signals can be routed to Line outs 3/4 and the Headphones bus for discrete cue mixing.Įach of the two Analog Inputs has a Unison insert point, and every channel, including the Talkback mic, can host up to four regular UAD effects plugins, making Console a useful standalone mixer. All of them sound and feel great, and Unison remains a huge and unique selling point for the Apollo Twin MkII.Īll members of the Apollo family are configured and handled using the excellent Console software application, which looks like a mixing desk with up to 14 Input channel strips (four of them ‘Virtual’ ones, visible as hardware outputs in your DAW), two auxiliary effects channels, and Control Room section and Monitor sections. Since then, they’ve been joined by the Manley Voxbox, Neve 1073 and 88RS eight guitar and bass amps by Ampeg, Fender and Marshall and three distortion stompboxes, including the bundled Pro Co Rat emulation, Raw. When we first reviewed the Twin, there were only three Unison plugins available - the UA 610-B (bundled), the UA 610-A and the API Vision. Direct monitoring with plugins, in other words. In a nutshell, it’s like singing into a real preamp, or playing guitar through a real distortion pedal, with no perceptible delay between input and output. These enable a gradually expanding subset of UA’s classic hardware emulation plugins to be inserted directly into each input path, physically reconfiguring the preamp’s impedance and gain staging - prior to the regular algorithmic modelling of valves, transistors, amps, EQ, etc - for near-zero-latency monitoring and/or recording through them. Also a ‘DSP box’ for powering UAD plugin effects (VST/AU/AAX/RTAS), the Apollo Twin MkII features the same game-changing Unison preamps as its predecessor, fed by the Mic/Line and Hi-Z ins.
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