Thinking about the antelope zen studio

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blungo2
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Thinking about the antelope zen studio

Post by blungo2 » Sat Apr 05, 2014 5:43 pm

I have an RME UFX at the little studio that i record at and an old apogee duet at home.

I keep thinking about another interface, something for home and mobile use that i could easily haul around wherever without bringing lots of gear (other than my little lunchbox). The zen studio seems to really fit. It's a bit pricey, but i've heard lots of good stuff about the antelope clock and convertors.

Anyhow, i'm seriously considering one. Thoughts?

edit: i've read bad stuff about the orion's mixer software, but they seem to be claiming that their new mixer/software is much better. I love RME's totalmix, so something that was less functional/stable would make it a non starter for me. I suppose there is a return policy if i buy the antelope and hate it though?

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Sugarnutz
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Post by Sugarnutz » Thu May 04, 2017 9:51 pm

I've got the new version, the Zen Studio+. Sucker sounds pretty good, but having issues with interfacing it to my PC. The plus version has a Thunderbolt jack in addition to the USB jack, but Thunderbolt support is Mac only, no Windows drivers except for the USB. I have a bootable hard drive for my PC of MacOS Sierra and even though my PC (Gigabyte GA-Z97-UD7-TH, Intel i7 4790K, 32 Gb ram) has Thunderbolt 2 ports, the Zen fails to pass audio there, I can control all features of the Zen via Thunderbolt, just no audio in or out.

I have a NEC chipset based PCIe USB card in this PC that will do 64 buffers solid in Pro Tools 12.7.1 on Windows 10 and 32 buffers on the Sierra side and consider this a necessity for running the Zen on USB as it has nothing else attached to this USB buss, motherboard USB ports probably won't cut it and there's a lot of evidence pointing to this on forums all over. If on a PC I would suggest getting the original Zen Studio saving the $700 difference, but you won't get all the new FPGA based effects that come with the +.
Gigabyte Z390 Designare/9900K/64GB/RX580/17TB storage/MacOS Mojave/Pro Tools Ultimate 2019.12/Avid Thunderbolt Native/Avid, Apogee & Digidesign converters

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