It all started around 1996 the Yamaha O2R had been released as the “industry Standard digital mixing solution”. I was 26 years old had been playing drums for over 10 years and I had to have one.
At a cost of $18,000 Australian dollars it would be the one purchase that started an obsession that till this very day I cannot shake.
It still holds pride of place in my home studio and while it’s in its 20’s it is the fastest most reliable piece of pro audio I own and has never missed a beat.
Along the way audio interfaces, I have owned
1/ a Sonorus STUDI/O A fantastic 16 channel adat card that stopped support with windows NT and the company is now dead.
2/ RME digi 32 8 channels of adat , driver support stopped at windows 2000 and had no 64 bit driver
3/RME digi 96/52 24 channels of adat driver support stopped at windows 2000 and had no 64-bit driver
4/M-Audio Profire Lightbridge 32 channels of adat light pipe on a firewire interface driver support stopped at windows 7 sp1 at least it had a 64bit driver
5/ Focusrite scarlett 18i20 gen 1 with 8 channels of adat usb 2 interface but anything over a dozen audio tracks and a dozen plugins and you had to crank the buffer up
6/Presonus studio 192 usb 3 interface with 16 channels of adat and 10 audio inputs with some onboard dsp we were getting close to a winner but while trying to track a 4-piece band running a live bfd3 plugin latency again stabbed me in the heart.
7/ Universal Audio Apollo x6 [ maybe not for long]
Four days ago I purchased a GC-ALPINE RIDGE Thunderbolt 3 card and a startec Thunderbolt 3 2 m cable
Three days ago without doing my due diligence with all my “acquired knowledge” I decided to bite the bullet and go and spend more money on something that I thought would change my fortune and let me create music without constantly managing resources like doing sub mixes so I would not run out of cpu power or not running plugins on input to cut latency.
The solution was going to be the Universal Audio Apollo x6 with its hexa core and uad2 Processing
Perfect for electronic music and post production.16 x 22 Thunderbolt 3 audio interface for Mac and Windows well so the web site says over at universal Audio.
Only problem is as you can see in my profile I run a Ryzen 1800x which is by far the most stable and powerful pc I have ever owned, but no thunderbolt.
As far as I can gather so far the card I purchased has been hacked to work but that’s not something available to me, or the only other option is the Titan Ridge PCIe card that I cannot find anywhere in Australia.
I work full time splicing optical fibre in the construction of the Australian NBN I earn around $60,000 a year have a wife and 2 kids and I have just flushed over $3000 dollars I don’t have. I tried to return the interface but the music shop said it’s not their fault I don’t have the right hardware.
Maybe my dream, my obsession is over.
That’s why I’m here If anyone out there can help me with my thunderbolt Dilemma please do. I cannot afford a new computer so thunderbolt 3 on my Asus crosshair VI hero is my only hope.
Kindest regards
Plugger