by Vijith

Broke-ass bedroom recordists of the world: your prayers either have just been answered or else are in need of some serious refactoring: the audio conversion wizards at Apogee have announced the One, their new USB desktop audio interface. Everybody and their brother is making those things nowadays, of course, but this particular product is more exciting than most of its competitors because of who designed it: Apogee rules the roost when it comes to high-end professional audio converters. (To be fair, there are converters of marginally better repute made by companies like Lavry and Crane Song, but those are outlandishly expensive mastering-grade boutique devices -- to put things in perspective, I don't think I know anybody who has ever seen one in real life.)

As you may remember, Apogee turned a lot of heads when they released the Duet in 2007 because it made all their engineering prowess more affordable than ever -- it went for half as much as its predecessor, the Mini-Me, which had a four-digit price tag -- rather uncomfortable, since it was a junior device of sorts, and the same dough could buy you a mid-grade eight-channel workhorse from a company like MOTU. By all accounts, the Duet sounded phenomenal considering its $500 price tag, which was very low for Apogee, if perhaps a bit more than comparable non-primo equivalents.

With the One, they've again cut the price in half, essentially chopping the Duet in half and adding a built-in condenser mic to create a barebones product clearly aimed at singer-songwriter types. Thus, the same caveats apply as with the Duet: it's Mac-only, CoreAudio-only so it won't work with Pro Tools, connections are made through a strange breakout cable to keep everything looking pretty, there's no S/PDIF I/O so it's not really all that future-proof, and the outputs are unbalanced. It also has some new compromises: since it's a one-input interface, you won't be able to do any stereo recordings (you can still do stereo stuff in the box, of course, since it does have two outputs) and since nitpicky details are scant so far, I can't tell whether it will accept line-level inputs (if I'm remembering correctly, there was also some ambiguity about this with the Duet prior to its release; it turned out that the instrument inputs could indeed take line-level signals, but the impedance was switchable using a software control panel -- again, a strange but aesthetically streamlined solution).

There might be more as-yet-unannounced cool stuff under the hood, though. For example, the Duet included novel features like a multifunction control knob that could be used to as an input gain control, output volume control, and MIDI continuous controller, and also a cool reamping loopback mode that negated the need for a Radial. As somebody who doesn't need one of these things, that's the part that I'll be most interested in. But those of you who have lost your job and want to record forlorn songs about your woes that will stand the test of time may want to tighten your belts one more notch, save a few more pennies, and then start getting excited.