RME Babyface Vs. UAD Apollo Duo Vs. Apogee Rosetta 200

[SuburbanThug]

I know quite a few forum members are fans of the Babyface but I'd really be interested in hearing some dissenters opinions! I read one review of the Babyface claiming the Rosetta 200 had a "wider" signal (??). A small footprint is nice but more important is the sound, baby. And sp/dif so I can control some modular gear using an ES-4. Thanks, guyz!

[jlgrimes]

I have an Apollo and don't see how you can get much better than that.

The preamps are pretty transparent. The ad/da conversion is also transparent.

It also features preamp emulations if you want to record with color. Only gripe is you only get 55 db of gain on preamp which is great for condensers but a little low for dynamics and ribbons.

[Machinesworking]

Apogee are a crap company, period.
RME and Metric Halo both have old firewire hardware that they write drivers for to this day, Metric Halo are even going to offer conversion kits from firewire to Thunderbolt for their 15 year old hardware. Apogee on the other hand relied on class compliance for their hardware and will not be supporting their firewire products now that the next version of OSX will not include a built in firewire driver.

I have no problem paying for boutique hardware if I get the sound quality and support that should entail, MH and RME are worth investing in for this reason.
My Firewire 800 from 2005 has a driver written this month I'm installing right now. Fuck Apogee!

[fishmonkey]

Apogee are a crap company, period.
RME and Metric Halo both have old firewire hardware that they write drivers for to this day, Metric Halo are even going to offer conversion kits from firewire to Thunderbolt for their 15 year old hardware. Apogee on the other hand relied on class compliance for their hardware and will not be supporting their firewire products now that the next version of OSX will not include a built in firewire driver.

I have no problem paying for boutique hardware if I get the sound quality and support that should entail, MH and RME are worth investing in for this reason.
My Firewire 800 from 2005 has a driver written this month I'm installing right now. Fuck Apogee!

i know that Apple have stopped development and maintenance of their Firewire Core Audio driver, but i hadn't heard about them dumping it from OS X 10.12. where did you read that?

Apogee did throw owners of their older Firewire interfaces a small bone last year, but it does still suck that they aren't supporting them anymore...

http://newscentral.exsees.com/item/ed5d ... f14f0fec07

totally agree about going with Metric Halo or RME for quality and long-term support (although i do have an Apogee Quartet here in my home studio)...

[jlgrimes]

Another gripe about Apollos are that even with Thunderbolt connections the round trip latency is pretty high compared to other interfaces due to the extra buffering needed to do realtime processing of UAD effects. With 44.1 kHz, your round trip will be about 10 ms. That said I really don't notice the added latency but I'll bet the other round trip latencies will be lower on interfaces like the Apogee and RME.

To re emphasize I play VSTis with the Apollo and don't notice any latency and record audio with the preamps and compressors in realtime and never experienced any latency effects.

Also UAD effects while top notch are expensive in money and DSP usage especially with newer plugins. The legacy compressors though are cheap from a DSP perspective so you can use a lot of La 2a legacy versions without running out of DSP but they only emulate the curves of the processor and not the nonlinearities like the newer UAD plugs but the legacy versions are still very usable.

These days from what I hear pretty much most new interfaces are pretty transparent even with the cheap ones and you probably won't notice much differences in sound quality between models especially if you know what you are doing and record leaving decent headroom. All three devices from what I've heard has great sound quality.

The main things are stability, performance, features and such.

[Machinesworking]

i know that Apple have stopped development and maintenance of their Firewire Core Audio driver, but i hadn't heard about them dumping it from OS X 10.12. where did you read that?

Apogee did throw owners of their older Firewire interfaces a small bone last year, but it does still suck that they aren't supporting them anymore...

http://newscentral.exsees.com/item/ed5d ... f14f0fec07

totally agree about going with Metric Halo or RME for quality and long-term support (although i do have an Apogee Quartet here in my home studio)...

That's about as small of a bone as you can get.

Sorry, Apple will probably keep their firewire driver in OSX as it stands, but that will eventually break, just like scsi did. RME and MH write their own drivers like they should, I would sell the Quartet.

Here's RME on the issue:

RME FireWire interfaces are also fully supported and continue to work with 10.11 and upcoming OS versions. There has been some confusion generated by Apple no longer supporting their own FireWire Core Audio driver, causing some well-known audio interfaces which relied on this driver to be no longer supported from 10.11. on. RME is not affected by Apple’s decision as RME develops their own drivers for all devices, and FireWire as such is and will stay supported from the operating system in the foreseeable future.

[redglass]

Would go for a used Babyface one. Later try to get a 8 channel ADAT-Mic-Preamp to connect to the Babyface via ADAT.
Love this combination: I have 10 channels micpre, long term supported RME drivers, digicheck tool plus a big knob on top it to handle Volume!

Some people don't like the attached break-out cable though...

Good luck!

[muthafunka]

Apogee are a crap company, period.
RME and Metric Halo both have old firewire hardware that they write drivers for to this day, Metric Halo are even going to offer conversion kits from firewire to Thunderbolt for their 15 year old hardware. Apogee on the other hand relied on class compliance for their hardware and will not be supporting their firewire products now that the next version of OSX will not include a built in firewire driver.

I have no problem paying for boutique hardware if I get the sound quality and support that should entail, MH and RME are worth investing in for this reason.
My Firewire 800 from 2005 has a driver written this month I'm installing right now. Fuck Apogee!

FYI Metric Halo conversion kit/upgrade is going to be firewire to USB, not Thunderbolt.
I'd only look at Apollo if I was 100% interested in getting into their plugin scheme.

[SuburbanThug]

UAD did kinda convince me with their plug-in scheme but I'm definitely going to look into Metric Halo per Machines suggestion. Thanks a lot guys, this is super helpful info. Guess the Babyface sounds better than ever at this point.