Antelope Zen Go Synergy Core

Pro:
- Convertoarele de pe acesta placa sunt aceleasi de pe placile de sunet mult mai scumpe de la Antelope
- Calitatea sunetului este exceptionala, nu gasesti ceva mai bun in acesti bani

Contra:
- Software-ul este mult prea greoi
- O multime de bug-uri
- Nu poti folosi placa daca nu ai internet
- Pana o instalezi dureaza o vesnicie
- Efectele nu functioneaza in DAW desi e lansata versiunea noua in care cica le poti folosi
- Suportul tehnic nu te ajuta cu nimic, raspund foarte greu si cand raspund vorbesc tot pe langa subiect

Concluzie:

La 499 de euro merita sa o cumparati pentru calitatea convertoarelor, in rest nu merita.

Очень доволен своим выбором в пользу Zen Go. Интерфейс действительно звучит хорошо, имеет низкие задержки. С Kemper Amp и в связке с Cubase отлично работает. Огромное также спасибо команде Antelope Audio за качественную и быструю поддержку. До этого использовал карты Roland Quad Capture и Focusrite Clarett 2pre и испытывал с ними проблемы. Однозначно Zen Go превосходит их вместе взятых как по качеству, так и по софту . Рекомендую получше присмотретьсяк данному интерфейсу!

I am Windows 10 user, I don't have MAC so I will speak from Windows/PC side only

Handling: 2/5
As other mentioned volume control knob is 1 for all 3 outs. There is a button you have to click to choose which out you control. Not practical at all. I swap 2 headphones very frequently + my monitos and this is big issue.

Features: 3/5
This device claims to have some great features like internal effects (DSP) on channels, but for example there is no MIDI IN/OUT , Software is complicated and buggy - Antelope constantly update it, but still it looks unfinished, made in a hurry. It has little screen with very nice level indicator. There was a BUG with screen brighness, when it was <100% it creates noise in monitors. Antelope was able to fix it with firmware update, but come on, this is untested hardware.

Sound: 2/5
I read many reviews about how great antelope converters are, and how good is their sound. This was not the case for me, I had very bad ground loop noise on USB, in my monitors, and it went even worst when I move my mouse. No matter what I switched off and changed it did not disappear. Contacted support on this, and after all the tests, they recommended to test the device on other PC system. It works on my Laptop in the office fine. Thou my 2 desktops had this ground loop noise in monitors. Support is slow, and was not able to help me, and the fact I can use this only on my laptop is not fine too.

I have Focusrite 4PRE usb and 2 Pre USB too. Both work great on same PC/monitors.

Headphone Out is weak, they made an firmware update which helped a little, but my 250ohm Neumann NDH20 must have almost 100% volume to sound good.

Quality: 3/5
Construction looks good, supplied cable is good - but something like electrical filters is missing IMHO

Overall: 2/5

Really bad experience with this device. This is my 6th or 7th Interface, and most of the others were cheaper. I never had such bad experience.

You need to register and activate device even for simple drivers to work.

The promised promotion code was delayed more than 7 days in my mailbox, and that was after I opened a ticket in support site.

Control panel is kind of complicated, they fixed load time a little - my started in 10-12 seconds.

ADAT has only 2 channels as INPUT - so you can't really expand it.

After uninstalling software, I had to clean services manually because they were not removed even after PC restart. Bad software quality for sure.

Oh and did I mention - no MIDI IN/OUT

Product need a lot of software polish and some hardware rework, maybe V2 or V3 will be good with promised features.

I'm a technical science communicator, reliant on using Linux. Linux has very poor audio support, and so the thing I was most interested in with this device was being able to build a nice vocal channel for streaming, presentations, calls etc. that is not dependent on the computer.

As the device is class compliant, it works totally fine with Linux, you just don't have ability to configure the plugins. However, I can do that in Windows, save to a preset and then I can select which preset to use for my task while using Linux.

I have 3 presets I use the most:

1/- clean - nothing, using for recording videos that I will process later
2/- voice channel - gentle compression and limiting, eq and a bit of a boost
3/- extreme monitoring - I often get a sore throat when I have lots of meetings, so I use the 2nd headphone monitor as an extremely loud monitor of my audio. That helps me talk softly, but an unprocessed version is sent to the conference. As the gain is so high, the background noise is loud, so I also add a gate on my monitor to make it less fatiguing.

Hopefully that gives you an idea of the flexibility of this unit.

The build quality is great, very solid. As others have said, the screen is a bit hard to read especially if there are reflections. The knob clicks too loud. And there could be more knobs/buttons, to make less combinations to change presets, adjust levels etc.

Sound quality is excellent, very low noise and a lot of mic gain. 2 monitors is also very nice. I never send the mic through the first monitor so I can't ever get feedback issues when I have my loud speakers on.

The bundled plugins seem good, but I'm just learning how to use them tbh. I would have liked some more 'basic' stuff like the ableton limiter, gate. Everything is 'vintage'. It would be amazing to load a VST into it and have it stored for use without the PC.

I had problems with some of the plugins not working, but the antelope support has been very fast to help and by using an older firmware I have all the plugins working now.

Expensive, but does the job and lets me do pro level audio processing without a windows / mac computer.