Apollo, Fireface or Saffire pro 40

[JimK]

Again,

This is just my opinion but for a HOME studio, you can't go wrong with the APOLLO... especially the plugins which, as you probably know, you can track with... as far as plugins go... UAD is reknown for their quality plugs and this interface has had nothing but RAVE reviews from the experts. I even saw a video of an entire song tracked with nothing more than the APOLLO. It is AMAZING but the plugs (which you can collect over time) aren't cheap.

Jim

PS - I have a couple of HELIOS Type 69 mic/pre's and was thinking of adding a couple more and 4 Helios type compressors which would have cost me another $7K at least but with the Apollo, I don't need to spend that kind of cash.

[Morbid_Savage]

UAD is of course wellknown for it's hardware emulation, but that doesnt really matter, since i use focusrites liquid mix and if i'd plan to upgrade i'd just buyed an uad pci card. Liquid mix was also greatly received by the press and some wellknown producers advertised it as well. What they didnt mention is that the eq emulations will fail in the low end and screw up your track, but that's a different story.
This upgrade that i plan is not for the home-studio, for which my saffire with a joemeek channel strip is sufficient, but for my main studio which i treat right now. Maybe i should describe the studio and it's goals first: The studio is located in a ww2 shelter, so the isolation from the outside world is obsolet. There are three rooms: Control room, main recording & rehearsing room and a vocal booth as well. The main tasks are: acoustic drum and electric guitar recording, as well as vocal and speech recording.
So i'm interested is it worth to spend the money on apollo or a fireface, rather then spending similar amount of cash for a professional channel strip that would than connected to saffire via adat or spdif. The other thing are the d/a converters. I also want to upgrade my main monitors from the krk vxt8 to ks digital c88. I was told that the saffire's d/a converters are not good enough for the c88. Any thoughts for a possible solution?

[JimK]

Craig Anderton has a complete, detailed review of the Apollo at:

Universal Audio Apollo Audio Interface + UAD 2 DSP - Harmony Central

It is quite thorough and should at least give you a good idea of what the Apollo is and isn't.

Jim