Apogee Duet 2 - Thinking of getting, madness?

[andrew00]

Hey,

If you're read any of the threads I've posted lately you might gather I'm moving soon so have been having a spring cleaning of my gear, having sold a lot of stuff and buying new things.

Recently I bought some Genelec 6010A monitors which are really good, although having plugged them into my MBPro I found I got radio interference from the headphone mini jack. I tested the speakers when idle - silent, when plugged into my iPhone - silent, and today when plugged into my Zoom H4N, with the Zoom acting as a usb interface - silent. So it's def the headphone jack.

I was going to get a Fiio E7 usb dac and plug the Genelec's into that, however I'm actually now consider getting the newly announced Apogee Duet 2. The reason being, I also own an Alesis Multimix 16 usb mixer, a massive beast used for a project and now basically idle - it's been used for my personal projects but that's only two inputs!

So I'm thinking of selling the Alesis and buying the Apogee Duet 2, the difference in price would be basically the cost of the Fiio E7 I was thinking of getting anyway, giving me both a top class dac/amp for playback, but also a great one for recording too, and it's small(ish)!

What do you think? Madness or smarts?

 

[Noiz2]

It looks fine, though it's not shipping yet and as a general rule you don't want to be on the "bleeding edge".

So other than it could take months to actually get the unit and there might be some over looked big problem that makes it not what you want, go for it.

Apogee is a good company and problems that are "bugs" they will probably fix. And the build quality should be good.

But for instance if your on Windows, and even Mac to an extent, how stable are the drivers? Do they work with the software you want to use?
All this has become less of an issue with a lot of software using the system sound settings but... almost everything has a certain shake out period and I have been on the wrong side of that too often. Plus with the chip interruptions because of Japan's ongoing disaster I would be doubly cautious buying anything electronic that you can't walk in and take home.