Igor Levin's brainchild, Antelope Audio, began around 20 years ago and has since become a popular choice for feature-rich audio interfaces at a competing price point. Not the cheapest brand, certainly, but you will often struggle to get the same feature set at the same price point from other manufacturers. Antelope’s current stable of products include the Orion and Goliath rack-mounted interfaces, Zen Tour desktop interface as well as their well regarded Isochrone Trinity master clocks and Satori monitor controller. Here we have the company’s first bus powered portable interface, the Zen Go Synergy Core.

Device Specification

The Zen Go Synergy Core is essentially a four in/eight out USB-C audio interface with a suite of integrated real time effects thrown in for good measure. It has two combi inputs allowing for 1/4” or XLR input, and a pair of 1/4” outputs for connecting to your studio monitors, with a second pair of outputs an alternative MONITOR line out on RCA connectors directly fed from the main DAC.

A feature not usually found on devices of this type is S/PDIF IO but the Zen Go Synergy Core has it, as well as a pair of individually assignable headphone outputs.. This is very welcome and greatly expands the device’s usefulness for location recording where you might need a separate headphone feed for talent.

It also has an IPS display for on-device display of mic preamps, headphone and monitor levels. On the right of the display are three buttons marked gain (for switching between inputs 1-2), hp/ mon (for switching between the monitor, headphone 1 and 2 outputs) and the third with the antelope symbol (which reverts you to the main level displays). To the right of that is a large alpha dial for changing preamp levels, headphone and monitor levels. The alpha dial feels great, properly weighted and very smooth.

Device Features

• USB-C to USB-C cable included.

• Includes 37 Synergy Core effects based on sought after vintage outboard equipment.

• DSP and FPGA chips ensure effects processing without noticeable latency.

• Customise your own presets. Easy I/O routing via preset settings - record and playback instantly.

• Bus-powered via USB (no power source required).

• 64-bit AFC clocking tech combined with a jitter management system ensures more detail and sonic separation in your recordings.

• Mix, playback and record up to 24-bit/192kHz.

• Superior AD/DA conversion (boasting up to 127dB of headroom).

• Monitor directly via the interface itself to minimise potential delay. Dedicated signal metering for output and input levels.

DSP Plug-ins

The Zen Go Synergy Core comes with an impressive number of DSP plugins which can be used in its mixer. 37 in total, covering preamps EQ, compression, modulation and a guitar amplifier with cabinet modelling. There is no DSP meter, which feels like an odd omission, but I was able to run a large number of plugins on the input channels without exhausting the available DSP.

Free Plugins Included With Zen Go Synergy Core

The device ships with a reverb plugin called ‘Auraverb’. Unlike competitor products this doesn’t run as an individual plugin and cannot be used as a channel insert. Instead it can be thought of as a reverb bus that you can send any input sources to, or even your entire mix, should you wish.

Antelope also make additional plugin products that can be purchased from their website ranging in price from €55 to €249, which can cover any additional needs for front end plugins.

Other Antelope products allow for these DSP based plugins to be used within a DAW via Antelope’s ‘AFX2DAW’ plugin bridge. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, this isn’t supported with the Zen Go Synergy Core but Antelope have not ruled out implementing it in the future.

Driver Install

Antelope’s driver installer is part of a software bundle with device firmware and a device control panel. The manager server allows wifi/network configuration of devices, especially useful in larger facilities running multiple Antelope products. The main application (named Antelope Launcher) is where you can run the device’s software mixer which is called ‘Control Panel’ in Antelope Launcher but the actual application itself is named ‘Zengosc’.

This might appear a little confusing to anyone who just wants to use a single device without any network features, as I suspect a lot of the device’s target audience will want. On the whole, once you get to grips with the way Antelope’s software works in conjunction with the hardware, it is pretty straight forward.

Latency

Device latency is quite good. Logic Pro X 10.6.1 reports 3.7ms latency at 44.1/48kHz and 3.3ms at 96kHz and above. Roundtrip latency is less of an important figure with this device, given the ability to monitor off hardware with the DSP effects running in the Control Panel mixer but for the sake of completeness those latency figures were 7.6ms at 44.1/48kHz and 6.9ms at 96kHz and above. The way most people will (and I would argue should) work with a device like this is to track whilst monitoring effects running in the software mixer, with near-zero latency.

In Use

If I had to think of a single phrase to sum up the UX of this device it would be ‘slick’. This really is an excellent and well thought-out product. Device stability is essentially perfect, no crashes or glitches in the 2 weeks that I have been using it on a daily basis. The supplied plugins sound very good indeed as do the preamps and analogue converters, which are supported by the 64 bit ‘Acoustically Focussed Clocking’ found on the higher-end Antelope products.

Conclusion

The Zen Go Synergy Core is an excellent device with a feature set not normally seen at this price point, which is £449. Its obvious competition would be UA Apollo Solo. The Apollo Solo (previously called the Arrow) had been my mobile interface for the last few years and it’s DSP hasn’t really been adequate for my purposes. In comparison the Zen Go Synergy Core, while offering a smaller catalogue of plugins offers more DSP and therefore more instances of those plugins, which for my purposes is preferable.

Pros

• Portable, bus powered audio interface at a great price point.

• Excellent value and more comprehensive IO than the competition.

• Sounds very good.

Cons

• AFX2DAW plugin not currently supported by this device.

• Slightly quirky driver/mixer arrangement.