Universal Audio is one of the biggest names in recording gear, largely due to the popularity of its famed, industry-standard Apollo Series of audio interfaces. Today, the brand has announced two more new interfaces joining that series this year: the Apollo Solo and Apollo Solo USB.
The Apollo Solo and Solo USB follow in the footsteps of previous Apollo series builds, with sleek, silver chassis and clean, unobtrusive layouts. In terms of I/O offerings, the Solo and Solo USB are twins with two inputs and four outputs. They also both feature a solo DSP, and both support Unison technology and the UAD plugin library.
"The secret to Unison is its hardware‑software integration between Apollo Solo’s mic preamps and its onboard UAD-2 processing," UA's Solo product page reads. "Simply place a Unison preamp plug-in on your mic input in Apollo's Console software, and it physically reconfigures Apollo’s impedance and gain staging — giving you the classic tube and transformer sounds of the world’s most recorded mic preamps and guitar amps."
What makes them different is that the regular Solo is a thunderbolt device that can run on Mac and Windows and is connected via USB-C cable. It also comes bundled with UA's brand-new Luna recording software (for Mac only). The Solo USB variant also has a USB-C port, but it's not a thunderbolt device (it's a USB-3 device) and needs a power supply.
If the new Solo and Solo USB look familiar to you, you're probably remembering Universal Audio's Arrow product from a few years back. As UA's senior product manager, Gannon Kashiwa, explains to Dustin from Vintage King in the video above, that's because the new Apollo Solo and Solo USB are actually what the Arrow line has become. As Kashiwa explains, this is to help mitigate consumer confusion since the Apollo series name is now so ubiquitous with the Universal Audio name.
To learn more about the Universal Audio Solo and Solo USB, check out the video above or see the specs on UA's product page here. You can also pick up your own Apollo Solo right here on Reverb.