Blog 1: Zen Studio by Antelope

               Hi every one and this is this weeks Infidel Audio's blog. This week and the next few weeks I will be posting products, innovations and advancements in the audio recording world. This week I will be talking about the Zen Studio by Antelope. I have working in professional studios as well as set up my own home recording studio in the basement of my house. I have an acoustically treated room at home filled with mid level equipment. I am still a collage student and I cant afford professional equipment but it does not stop me from making excellent recordings. I currently use a FocusRite 18i20 as a interface. It is a very nice unit for the $500 price tag. The unit features nice preamps and loads of additional features but is designed to a mid level interface. This is where the Zen Studio comes in, Pro Audio Review pick this product as the winner of the 2014 Innovated Products award. After spending some time reading reviews and watching clips on the unit I can see why it won awards and why even professional engineers and producers are using this. Antelope Audio Acoustically Focused Clocking provides the most authentic analog sounding A/D & D/A conversion on the market. Antelope's clocking and conversion along with the custom USB technology implemented in Zen are identical to the ones in the top-selling 32-channel Orion interface which is a centerpiece in the playback rigs for artists such as Rihanna, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, and inside the mixing and mastering studios of engineers like Eric Sarafin (aka Mixerman), Brian Vibberts, Howie Wienberg or electronic music producers like Robert Babicz and Dusty Kid. In addition to proven sound quality, Zen Studio offers an extremely powerful DSP, based on a custom FPGA device with massive parallel processing capabilities. The proprietary FPGA makes the DSP chip in Zen Studio eight times more powerful than the ones used in similar devices. This allows fast and easy simultaneous processing of multiple effects, enhancing the workflow like no other device on the market. Zen Studio is fully controllable using an intuitive desktop application on both PC and Mac, offering flexible signal routing and DSP-based effects alongside custom presets. Users can create up to four independent, zero-latency mixes assignable to any outputs, including the two independent headphone outputs and monitor outputs. All audio I/O is available simultaneously for a total of 38 possible input and 32 output channels, plus 24 simultaneous I/O channels via custom USB, supporting 24-bit, 192 kHz audio. This unit is amazing sounding and turns out beautiful recordings. This is not a entry level or mid level interface and the price tag shows. Coming in at just under $2,500, the Zen studio and other products should be a main stay in an engineers arsenal for both  the home and for the studio. Thank you for taking the time to read and please subscribe.