The Apogee Duet 3’s mic preamps are built with the company’s Advanced Stepped Gain Architecture. This is an analog circuit that dynamically optimizes across a 0–65 dB gain range to provide exceptional bandwidth with the lowest possible distortion. On the other hand, the Apogee Duet 3 is strictly a 2-in/4-out USB-C audio interface with 2 microphone preamps and hardware DSP. There are two programmable function buttons above the big knob. I set one to MONO and the other to MUTE SPEAKERS. Another popular setting is to use one button to select which channels are fed to the headphones, for instance, for cueing.

This is a massive feat, as you can incorporate legendary sounds in your mix with authenticity. This allows you to work with tools that are not only iconic and very useful, but also quite expensive in their original hardware form factor.For instance, let’s say you want to record a singer that also plays guitar, but you want to capture it all at once, with the guitar on a stereo mic setup. You can do that with the Babyface, but not with the Duet 3 (as the latter only allows for 2 simultaneous inputs). Using the very latest technology and drawing upon the experience of developing Apogee’s new flagship audio interface, Symphony I/O, Apogee engineers rebuilt Duet to achieve a difference you can hear.

The Duet 2's OLED screen is beautifully implemented in a most welcome, understated fashion. Clear and informative graphics display the unit's metering, input and output level settings, input selection and grouping, as well as phase, muting, phantom power and Soft Limit indicators. Relative gain (dBr) plotted around 0 dBFS analog input level, Mic input set to 60 dB gain, Soft limit (yellow trace) versus regular (green) . ESS Sabre32 32-bit Hyperstream DAC with Time Domain Jitter Eliminator offers unequalled dynamic range, ultra low distortion, and unmatched audio clarity free from input jitter.

Key Features

Also in this bundle is Brainworx bx_opto, which yields classic optical-style compression with a streamlined interface. On top of that, there is also bx_masterdesk, which reproduces the sound of a high-end analog mastering system. The Duet 3 is a 2-in/4-out bus-powered USB-C audio interface that is capable of recording at up to 24-bit/192kHz, and offers built-in compression EQ and saturation processors thanks to onboard DSP. There are two mic preamps offering up 65dB of gain, and the device will also happily accept line-level and instrument sources. A pair of line-level monitor outputs are provided, along with a stereo headphone output. The headphone and the line (speaker) outputs both have enough gain to let you play the softest sections of classical recordings loudly enough to hear what's going on. If you want to hear the room noise in a classical recording, you're going to hear it.