Universal Audio Apollo Solo USB Heritage Ed.

I just bought a new Apollo Solo USB. It is working just great. I used to have cheaper interfaces and this is completely a different beast. I like it and recommend it to Win10 users. I am on Pro Tools, but I am suree it works with any major DAW'.

It do not have a great deal of features, but the quality counts. It is stable and comes with all kinds of plugins you may need. UA is not the cheapest company what comes to hardware and plugins. If you need more features in this price range - check ie. Audient stuff.

Apollo Solo is just a joy to use.

First, go on google and search it up on tons of problems with this product that users have raised and seeking help from the manufacturer. Before purchase, I thought the problems only exist on the Thunderbolt Mac version if use in Windows, while the USB version would be fully compatible with Windows. However, it is not fully compatible and when I contacted support from UAudio, they acknowledge the incompatibility and basically said fix it yourself, customer. While there are workarounds like installing third party drivers, etc, you gotta do it yourself and it does not fully work well compared to if the manufacturer themselves make it, if you know what I mean. Well, that is not all. This is just the icing on the top.

I have used this product for around 2 weeks and everyday different problems arose from it. Sometimes there is popping and chopping audio on the recordings from this product. Somedays it has popping, somedays it has distortions, somedays it has chops, in recordings through this product. It has a lot of flavors to say the least.

Thirdly, it does not have the feature to turn off direct monitoring of the inputs in the channels, you can only mute them. And if you mute them and if you want to record the inputs from the Monitoring output, there will be nothing since you muted it. There are use cases for this. Lets say you don't want to hear the direct monitoring of the inputs, and only want to hear the PC audio, while wanting to record the Monitoring output because you want the effects added to the main channel input or volume gains from AUX or Analog volume settings in your recordings. Well, since you muted it because you don't want to hear the direct monitoring, this use case is not supported. There are workarounds, but it is stupid for a product priced high as this.

If you want to hear a use that might run smoothly for this product, I guess it would be just the plug ins that you need to buy from their website UAudio. And maybe the Thunderbolt version on "Mac" might work more smoothly as people said on the net? Well I mean ain't products this price be able to work smoothly out of the box? Laughs.

Just want to add on lastly, even though their user manual for this product has 200 over pages, it does not explain what the volume settings of certain outputs do, figure out yourself laughs. Therefore I am getting so much distortion in my recordings I don't know if it is my Shure M58 mic issue or the volume settings tweaking that needs to be adjusted.

Working as advertised. The interface is recommended to be used with Intel motherboard, but I have been using it with AMD and did not have any issues in performance so far. Been thinking between this and Apollo Twin, but the Solo being one core showed to be sufficient for my needs for DSP processing.

Pros:
It is a gamechanger to be able to hear or record vocals with onboard DPS with no latency, it really helps with the performance song. I have been using only the DSP plugins that came with the interface, and they are by themselves already giving amazing results. The interface clicks (makes a physician sound) when changing impedance while using different preamps in Unison mode, which is quite cool.

Cons:
What was a bit of a drag was setting up, it took me a long time to figure it out. For example, I had to turn off my antivirus to be able to download updates. I also had to buy a USB-c cable (not included in package) and it had to be the one with the highest speed for the interface to work) etc.

Overall I am happy with the purchase and giving a total of 5 stars, even though I would give it a total 4.5 realistically due to handling issues: USB cable not being included and the initial setup being difficult.