Product Reviews

If any audio company could be said to mirror Apple's high-end product appeal and minimalist design ethos, it's Apogee. Following the success of the eight-channel Ensemble comes a logical distillation of that product: the FireWire-powered two-channel Duet.

Featuring the same microphone preamps, the Duet pares the on-board fripperies to the bare essentials - which in the case of the hardware means one big knob and a breakout cable. Everything else (such as signal routing) is controlled by software, either Apogee's own Maestro or the dedicated Apogee Setup pane within Logic Studio and Express.

The device is a nice size and surprisingly lightweight. The pleasingly tactile control knob has an easy click-cycle between system playback volume and the separate recording levels of tracks one and two. You can also set it to perform certain Midi functions, such as scrubbing audio playback in Logic. All in all, the design perfectly complements a MacBook Pro (or PowerBook). But the lumpen clutch of connector jacks and plugs unquestionably spoils the Duet's graceful lines. The cable is heavy and cumbersome, causing the unit to annoyingly slide around the table. Also the connector plug can suffer serious strain when gravity

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takes hold. We'd be happier to have the Duet an inch taller, wider and deeper if it meant accommodating the jacks internally.

Fortunately, this sow's ear of an interfacing solution does not interfere with the silk purse that is the Duet's audio capture performance. The sonics of the Duet are fantastic (up to 24bit/96KHz), with both mic and line inputs turning in stellar results and the (single) headphone jack serving up a crystal-clear reproduction. Many musicians are fans of Apogee for the audiophile nature of it's A/D/A conversion and the Duet maintains this deserved reputation.

In terms of routing the audio, the software control panel allows you to set the input to be XLR mic, XLR line or Instrument. Additionally you can reverse the phase of one channel (great for stereo mic techniques), manually control the gain (up to 75dB) and group both channels together to match their levels. You can also set the output to be Line or Instrument - there's a Mute button too.

A further software window houses a mixer section for the Duet's I/O activity, enabling you to pan the channels, ride the faders, mute and solo each track, and bring in a stereo track from your Mac to blend with the incoming audio on Duet's two channels. The audio in/out provision is first-class, while the integration with digital audio workstations, especially Apple's own, is blissfully straightforward.

The Duet may boast only two in/two out, basic metering, just two phantom power lights for each channel on the front, and no Midi, S/Pdif, Adat, RCA jacks or additional analog I/O. But the sound... beautiful!

For those who genuinely need nothing more than a highly portable, pristine stereo audio interface, the Duet presents a no-frills, no-compromise solution at a price point where it has no serious competition.