Anyone Using Apogee Ensemble? How Does It Sound?

Well all this is highly subjective but those MOTU conveters are lousy IMHO and if the Ensemble sounded worse that something was seriously wrong with it or the way it was set up.

i love these discussions....

these units use the same converters. asahi kasei converters i believe. its the other electronics and clock jitter which make these units sound different. ok, i realize it is in practical terms a semantic difference but it tells you something about what you can do with these units, and how different they really are from one another.

never-the-less, i would say asher is right - virtually all the reviews both of people i know with them and that you can read will say that sound wise the ensemble is a step up.

thumbs up for apogee.
have used their boxes since 1993, rugged and reliable, with superior sound quality.
Have motu 896HD, and would like it to travel, preferably away from my ears.

Am experimenting with tube input and output stages atm.

Thinking of developing a converter on these principles.

Sorry but the only conclusion I can come to is that you are employed by Motu to have posted this. If not, you are doing something completely wrong.

Would you guys mind sharing what kind of latency your
getting with this unit???

What are your buffers set at?
96khz, 192?

Can you monitor all 4-mic channels with software
monitoring on without a noticable delay?

Hi. I have been using an Ensemble for about 4 months now, and the sodtware is getting better and much more solid than at first, when it was a bit unstable and required some handholding.

In the last release there was a major improvement in latency. I ran some tests where I patched the headphone O/P into an input and recorded a signal out from Logic. The measured lag was around 11 samples at 44.1 Khz, or around 0.2 msec. At a sample buffer of 128 that should translate to about 3 msec for software monitoring. I have recorded with all 4 mic channels + software monitoring, works great. Certainly no noticable delay - with a faster box you might get 64 or even 32 samples working if you are very sensitive to delay.

I think this is a great interface and a HUGE step up from the MOTU 828mkii I was using before. The integration with Logic combined with great sound and wonderful preamps with loads of gain (great DI as well) are all strong points.

-Fred



2GB G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

2GB G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Hi Fred,

Thank you for your responce.

I will be rocking the unit with a MBP C2D 2.16 3gb Ram.

I need to be able to run Vox / Guitar / Bass / Pair of Overheads thru software monitoring (eq,verb,compression).

Everyone tells me a different order to power up!

If I have a firewire hard drive I am suposed to boot it and the Ensemble first. (According to Apogee)

If not, I am to boot the Computer first.( According to Apogee)

From experiance, right now with all the current updates for my macbook pro and Ensemble. If I boot my MacbookPro first I will get distortion out of my output. Headphones and Main. If I go to reboot core audio ( as per Apogee instruction), I get about 30 seconds of clean sound and then distortion arrives with a vengance).

If I boot with the Ensemble first I get many pops and clicks. I have to reboot about 3 or 4 times to finally get the driver to engage properly.

Apogee you have told me 2 different ways to boot. Just tell which is correct then I know if my Ensemble needs replacing or not

-Allan

P.S.

It sounds amazing !!