Apogee Duet 2
12/06/11 11:34 Filed in: Hardware
Time marches on, and Curly's eye tends to stray to the latest and greatest new hardware. So it was with the Apogee Duet 2, which arrived promising better sound than before, fancy OLED displays and support for balanced outputs.
As Curly pointed out to me, this meant that he could connect up his Quad active speakers directly without any of the electrical gremlins that afflicted the previous setup. Once he had shown me the OLED displays and touch buttons, the sale was made. In this case, we used Digital Village. Since this was a pre-order and Apogee eventually delayed the launch, I was very impressed that Digital Village kept me updated and gave me the chance to cancel as the dates shifted. Anyway, Curly and I showed unparalleled patience and eventually the Duet 2 arrived.
The new box is roughly a similar size to the old one, but very different in looks with an inlaid black plastic front that hides the two touch sensitive controls and OLED displays. There is now a USB 2.0 connection rather than FireWire - probably because FireWire's days appear numbered rather than any failings in it as a standard. The new breakout cables combine some of the previous connections to reduce the bulk.
So how does it sound? In a word, lovely. The sound is indeed very pleasing. Is it much better than the existing Duet in sound quality? It isn't night and day, but it does seem to offer a slightly better overall sound. The new features are nice too, and the unit does look very good.
The downsides are that the delays in launch seem symptomatic of Apogee struggling to get the units ready in time (in fact, supplies still seem to be erratic). There have been a few firmware updates already and the unit has tended to lose connection with the Mac rather more frequently than Curly would like. It also tends to send a nasty spike through the speakers on boot up. However, the latest driver and firmware versions are showing some promise so things are improving. A beta version appeared on launch day for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), which was very welcome.
It has been a slightly bumpy launch, but the hardware shows plenty of promise. It isn't a big jump over the original Duet (which is still an excellent piece of kit), and there are not really too many compelling reasons to upgrade. But I'm sure Apogee will continue to hone the drivers and firmware and show the Duet 2 to be a fine little unit.
Update 04/2012: The Duet 2 drivers continue to present issues, often crashing USB on my Mac (which with a USB keyboard presents some issues). Apogee recently released ‘interim’ drivers that help with failure to recognise the unit on boot up. However, they also cause my Mac to fail to wake from sleep, which is very unwelcome. I’d not recommend the unit, since it has had driver problems from launch and they still have not been fixed. It sounds great, but the overall ownership experience is ruined by the driver instability.
As Curly pointed out to me, this meant that he could connect up his Quad active speakers directly without any of the electrical gremlins that afflicted the previous setup. Once he had shown me the OLED displays and touch buttons, the sale was made. In this case, we used Digital Village. Since this was a pre-order and Apogee eventually delayed the launch, I was very impressed that Digital Village kept me updated and gave me the chance to cancel as the dates shifted. Anyway, Curly and I showed unparalleled patience and eventually the Duet 2 arrived.
The new box is roughly a similar size to the old one, but very different in looks with an inlaid black plastic front that hides the two touch sensitive controls and OLED displays. There is now a USB 2.0 connection rather than FireWire - probably because FireWire's days appear numbered rather than any failings in it as a standard. The new breakout cables combine some of the previous connections to reduce the bulk.
So how does it sound? In a word, lovely. The sound is indeed very pleasing. Is it much better than the existing Duet in sound quality? It isn't night and day, but it does seem to offer a slightly better overall sound. The new features are nice too, and the unit does look very good.
The downsides are that the delays in launch seem symptomatic of Apogee struggling to get the units ready in time (in fact, supplies still seem to be erratic). There have been a few firmware updates already and the unit has tended to lose connection with the Mac rather more frequently than Curly would like. It also tends to send a nasty spike through the speakers on boot up. However, the latest driver and firmware versions are showing some promise so things are improving. A beta version appeared on launch day for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), which was very welcome.
It has been a slightly bumpy launch, but the hardware shows plenty of promise. It isn't a big jump over the original Duet (which is still an excellent piece of kit), and there are not really too many compelling reasons to upgrade. But I'm sure Apogee will continue to hone the drivers and firmware and show the Duet 2 to be a fine little unit.
Update 04/2012: The Duet 2 drivers continue to present issues, often crashing USB on my Mac (which with a USB keyboard presents some issues). Apogee recently released ‘interim’ drivers that help with failure to recognise the unit on boot up. However, they also cause my Mac to fail to wake from sleep, which is very unwelcome. I’d not recommend the unit, since it has had driver problems from launch and they still have not been fixed. It sounds great, but the overall ownership experience is ruined by the driver instability.