Ableton Forum

its just headphones.

although I'm not thrilled at the latency problems people are having with the duet (and I hope they've been solved with an update) I should mention the answers to a couple open questions here:
Yes, you can mute your speakers/headphones independently of each other. That's different than adjusting volume, I know, but with volume you could adjust your speakers relative to the phones, and move them grouped. Not much of a sacrifice.
No SPIDF because the DA/AD conversion is what people are buying this for. THe SPIDIF would put the pressure on external gear to make the AD conversion-kinda like putting ice cubes in your pellegrino, if you want to be an audio dick about it.
You can make an aggregate output, but I haven't tested it to see if it's practical. Any chance you can do MONO FOH, and MONO CUE, you'd be better off. What else?

Q: Can Duet be used as an Aggregate Device?
A: No, it is not supported to use Duet as an Aggregate Device.

Seems to be only one way to read this but I feel it can't be true.

Can anyone confirm?
Will it literally not let me agg it with MB onboard?
I don't care that i can't control the vol from the MB's onboard phones out coz I can just use Live's cue volume for that.

Can anyone try this please?

I thought the whole point of this was that you could use it as an agg device?

Am I right in thinking that the Duet Mic Pres are considered the best of interfaces in that price range, and that they would even trump some other budget Mic Preamp solutions??

I was thinking about buying a Mic Pre to work with my AKG C4000 mic and MBox2Pro, but part of me thinks the Duet would be a better integrated solution for clean vocal recording.

Is anyone using duet with a Lucent cipset?
If so are u using MB / MBP / other ?
Any issues?

condra wrote:Am I right in thinking that the Duet Mic Pres are considered the best of interfaces in that price range, and that they would even trump some other budget Mic Preamp solutions??

I seem to be hearing that Apogee are considered best, or among the best, for sound quality in general - not necessarily just the pre's

Just converted to Mac - iMac 24" 2.8ghz Core2Duo with Logic Pro and an Apogee Duet .............only been a week but I am very impressed myself.
Even at 44.1khz operation the sound is pretty damn impressive.
Sounds better to my ears than the Echo Audio PCMCIA card on my PC Notebook.
Latency has been great, no glitches or other issues either .

I have an MBox 2 Pro, and despite being the more expensive of the three, I was told elsewhere that the preamps on a TC Konnect 8, or Apogee Duet would give better recording results.

OvertoneZero wrote:I thought the whole point of this was that you could use it as an agg device?

As I understand it, you can. Apparently Apogee doesn't "officially" support it, but I remember reading in other threads about people who were running two duets simultaneously.

@Oscar
does it work as an Aggregate Device with your iMac's onboard soundcard?
Could u please try it for me and see if u can cue thru the iMac's phones out without mad latency?

misteron wrote:Is anyone using duet with a Lucent cipset?
If so are u using MB / MBP / other ?
Any issues?

(You can find which chipset you are using by booting osx while holding CMD+S.)

I would be REALLY greatful if you could get me this info.

Thanks,
Ron

misteron wrote:

Q: Can Duet be used as an Aggregate Device?
A: No, it is not supported to use Duet as an Aggregate Device.

Seems to be only one way to read this but I feel it can't be true.

Can anyone confirm?
Will it literally not let me agg it with MB onboard?
I don't care that i can't control the vol from the MB's onboard phones out coz I can just use Live's cue volume for that.

Can anyone try this please?

It's there on the page somewhere, but internal sound card is actually the only card Duet DOES SUPPORT and works with as an aggrogated device. This way you can output ie. metronome from the internal and use Duet for audio output.

I've tested this and it works. I aggrogated Duet with MBP's internal card and it works as long as you remember to check "Resample" in Aggrogate setup. Do this for internal soundcard only. This causes Duet to resync the internal card in case it starts to drift out of sync (and it does). After doing this with Resample on, I they kept in sync together. But if there was a really huge CPU spike, they could start drifting. This was fixed by stopping and playing again, but this of course isn't too good in Live situation. But without huge spikes it should be fine.

This is great news thanks.

Just a question re this quote.

posssu wrote:I aggrogated Duet with MBP's internal card and it works as long as you remember to check "Resync" (or whatever it was called) in Aggrogate setup...

Do u mean u need to click resync once after creating the agg device?
Or u need t do it periodically during playback thru the agg device?

(Edit: According to other forums the Duet is absolutely fine with Lucent - sweeeeeeet!)

When you create the device, there is some button called "Resample" (I checked the name now, it wasn't Resync like I said before), a checkbox, next to both devices your're aggrogating. It is possible to check it both, but you only need to check it for the INTERNAL soundcard (I also said this the wrong way in my previous post, I fixed it there now). This will tell Duet to keep on resyncing the internal soundcard automatically so it doesn't drift. It's all automatic as long as you setup it right.

It doesn't work if you check them both or none.

sweet , thanks for that posssu

You can easily mute the headphones or monitors by clicking the big wheel. Nothing to it.

The Duet has by far the best preamps I've ever heard for double or even triple the price. Not harsh, not muddy, not thin--just perfection in preamp form.

As others have said latency is a function of software hardware underwear and anywhere. Generally I keep it at 128 samples for recording audio, bump up to 256 for recording soft synths or a guitar with Waves GTR with software monitoring, and crank it up for mastering.