Antelope Zen Studio for homerecording and portable recordings-Wowee what fun

[reverbdk]

So I made the first serious financial investment into my studio setup with a new Antelope Zen Studio interface. I look forward to sharing about it here everytime I can.
Antelope Audio Zen Studio | Sweetwater.com

So far I have set it up in my rack and recorded two tracks at most. Some things to note with starting fresh:
0) For a portable recording option, this thing is a perfect beast. All I need now is my rack and my little laptop. It's uber quiet on the preamps and works seemlessly once you get the firmware updates.

1) The proprietary rackmount is recommended if not necessary. It's way overpriced and takes up twice the rackspace, but the interface has NO areas to screw in anything underneath, so you could not screw it into a universal rackmount kit. I'm sure you could get creative and jerryrig something, but the proprietary mount holds the interface super solid...almost worth 75$

2) I currently having it track through a dinky Lenovo laptop with 4gb ram, 1.5ghz processor i3, and so far have not had serious issue. USB 2.0 seems to be alright, but like I said I have only tracked 2 things at once so far. No real latency issue running at 24bit 44.1khz in Reaper.

I'm super pumped and will keep you all updated. Thanks for the help and advice over the years.

 

[greengyozaman]

Sounds fun - I was looking at Antelope Zen too... But I decided to go with the Prism Lyra 2 and plan to trade in my Focusrite Octopre Mk II for something like the Audient ASP 880 8-channel preamp to connect via ADAT. But I was tempted by it nevertheless particularly with the number of connections you can have... You're right thought - I wasn't too sure about the shape of the Zen unit with connections all over the sides...

My Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is 16 Gb RAM, 3rd-generation core i7, with two SSD drives (1TB and 250GB). No problem so far with my Studio One Pro connected to Focusrite Scarlett 18i6, and don't expect anything different from the Prism unit...

 

[rickertd]

I went all out for the Antelope Orion32 and could not be more pleased...more like blown away...with the quality, extreme low latency. I run tracking to it through a Mackie 32x8 and use the mixer for summing as well. The flexibility is amazing. I can put any channel onto any track input to my PC for Pro Tools and any track onto any channel on the mixer for summing with the software that was included. Also, the converters are incredibly clear and I can't believe they were able to get 32 tracks at 24 bit 192Khz through a USB port. I also looked at the Zen, but really wanted the 32 analogue outputs and didn't need the pre-amps.
I know you are going to love your interface. Antelope is the best for the price range, IMO. If I get rich though...Burl Mothership full of I/O is next!