Buying a piece of studio equipment is always a commitment. How does the small studio owner choose an interface within budget that isn’t going to end up on the shelf?
Our Needs Grow
On the assumption there’s a budget involved, buying the best possible studio gear that’s on the money is always a good idea. Why? Regardless of our own current needs or those of the client, they often change, and if we’re lucky that means expansion. You can do small jobs on a big box but sadly for our wallets the reverse isn’t true! While buying something that doesn’t fill our budget initially affords us money to spend elsewhere, it’s more expensive to buy something bigger later down the line given the lower resale value on your old box. It could be argued that on a big piece of studio ‘infrastructure’ such as an interface, the long game is something worth considering.
Avoiding Overkill
Crystal balls aside, there is a point where extra functionality stops being future-proof, and becomes something for a larger facility to worry about. A good example is audio networking. Will you ever need the ability to move enormous amounts of audio data between rooms and pieces of gear? If one day that happens, you should be able to take the hit on selling your old 8X8 anyway. All we need to do is take a more pragmatic approach, and understand that our future needs almost always outstrip our current ones.
Does This Sound Like You?
People who own decent private studios often share a common story as to how their gear grew with their needs, involving surprisingly few upgrades along the way. The DAW studio era has been with us long enough to have turned out studio owners who have owned the whole gamut of computer peripheral gear. Many will have started out with a 2 or 4 input interface and a handful of other pieces at home, before finding themselves in a dedicated space with multichannel capability. The trick is to understand that the actual functionality at the heart of all setups is in fact quite similar- all we have to do is choose an interface that can bridge some gaps between moves.
Antelope Audio ZenQ Synergy Core
While we are not short on mid-price desktop interface choices, at around £700/$950 this smart little 14 in, 10 out black box from Antelope Audio does present its own take on the desktop paradigm that takes on some of the more established choices offering expandable inputs and onboard DSP effects and mixing.
• 2×Discrete ultra-linear preamps with 65dB of gain for studio-quality recordings. Both work as microphone/line/ Hi-Z inputs, on combo XLR jacks, and supply 48V of phantom power. This means that you can plug anything into it to record.
• Digitally expandable over ADAT IN , with 8 channels available. This is the big one- it lets you expand the number of mics or line sources by letting you hook up an external preamp using a fibre optic lightpipe. This would give you 10 mic inputs in many cases- enough for a whole band.
• Direct monitoring with Synergy Core effects, processed in real-time using 2×DSP & 1 × FPGA chip with imperceptible latency. Being able to track with 37 Synergy Core high quality effects, including a collection of authentic sounding guitar rigs is a major bonus in any session. On tracking sessions you can record a DI as well to fire into the guitarist’s own rig afterwards to reduce spill while recording.
• 2 × Stereo headphone outputs with separate volume control. These can be fed from separate mixes thanks to the ZenQ DSP mixer. If you’re tracking a band these can also be used to feed multiple artists’ headphones using amps accepting TRS stereo.
• 2×Hi-Z/line instrument inputs over TRS for direct guitar or synths.
• 2×DC-coupled line outputs over TRS for a pair of monitors.
• Digitally expandable over S/PDIF I/O, with 2 channels available. Squeeze in an extra suitably-equipped preamp or instrument.
• Bus-powered interface powered by the Thunderbolt or USB-C connection without the need for a dedicated power source
The Interface That Does It All?
Buying the best we can within budget reduces the number of upgrades over a career, and some top studio owners can count the number of upgrades it took to build their business on one hand. Units like the ZenQ Synergy Core demonstrate what makes it so easy to be the small studio owner/engineer right now. With a deceptively large expandable channel count and high quality onboard effects, ZenQ Synergy Core could very easily do it all for a long time to come.