Apollo Solo
Customer Reviews
Apollo Solo
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D. Russell
Fantastic interface.
A truly amazing piece of technology for anyone looking to take music more seriously on a budget. Pro-level equipment for sure with a great preamp to capture sound nicely. The plug-ins that it comes with anre icing on the cake. I really do love this interface and my experience has been overly positive so far. When buying this interface I would be cautious about how much DSP you are going to be using. Remember that you’re not able to mix large projects with UAD plug-ins as it will take up too much DSP with the Apollo solo. If you’re looking to mix bigger projects Definitely look into the Apollo twin or further.
H. Poth
Apollo Solo Heritage Edition
I was looking for a portable interface for mobile recording with zero latency DSP powered monitoring. The Solo fits my needs perfectly, it is bus powered, and offers zero latency monitoring with the UA plugins, which are great. I got the Heritage Edition, and the native versions of the included plugins get a lot of use. The Solo DSP power is not enough to use the DSP powered plugins in a mix, but I would not want to do that anyway since my "stationary" studio setup is without UA hardware. Anyway, it is enough for recording and monitoring with a Unison pre, an 1176 and a Pultec, and a PurePlate on send. Converter quality and headphones amp are great, hardly heard anything as good in that price range. Preamps with the Unison plugins (I got the UA 610 collection, V76, API, Helios and Century) enable excellent recordings with a broad colour palette. Very happy with my purchade.
C. Espinosa
Best investemt to record with no latency in a portable way.
I own an Apollo X4 and I felt it was too bulky to take on the road. The Solo provides what I need in a portable and affordable way.
j. white
Doesn’t work with adapter
Universal Audio promotes the solo to be backwards compatible but doesn’t let you know that you need more than an adapter to power the device .
M. Goldberg
Very Happy with this Purchase!
I wish I had made the move to my Apollo Solo a long time ago. It does everything I need and I am more than satisfied with my purchase. Thanks, Universal Audio, for a great product.
B. ŠURGOT
Unstable installation
The advantage is quality A/D converters, thunderbolt connection with MacOs - very fast communication and power supply.
The disadvantage is the relatively complex installation in MacOS vz.Sonoma 14.5, I was bothered by the need to change the system security and also the need to install all UAD plugins, when the volume of downloaded data, including the operating system, reached almost 10 Gb. After putting my MacBook Pro M2 Max to sleep, the Apollo solo stops recording, input doesn't work, only output, so I have to restart the Mac. So far, I'm solving it by disconnecting the thunderbolt cable before waking up the Mac, then reconnecting it after waking up the Mac. It heats up very quickly.
In my opinion, the audio interface should work immediately after plugging in - plug and play and downloading related/accompanying software/plugins should be left to the user's choice. I prefer hardware over software plugins for recording and I'm used to working in Logic Pro. So I don't need the installed software, including the UAD plugins, it takes up space on the HDD unnecessarily.
M. Sengelman
I really like it.
I've been using Solo for a couple of weeks now. Great for vocal tracking. I really like it.
R. Butler
Blown Away
I got reeled into UA via a free native Teletronix plugin. After a few hoops, I installed in on an old laptop that had an old session and plugged it in... and wow! The bass guitar track exploded. I was immediately hooked. Without doing any research and not knowing much about UA at this point, I proceeded to buy a UAD plugins bundle and not native. Then I realized I needed to buy the hardware to run the plugins, after shopping around I bought the Apollo Solo. I downloaded LUNA and put together my first microphone recordings with the UNISON option using CONSOLE and my microphones have never sounded so good. The preamps are stunning. And many unique ones to choose from. I am really satisfied but the UA stuff is addicting. I recently purchased a UAD-2 QUAD for an older computer that I use for multitrack recordings and I'm amazed with the workload that it can handle. I've got my eyes on some APOLLO 8 devices but resisting is difficult. To have these UA UNISON preamps on 4 or 8 input channels would be mind blowing.
M. Santos
Game Changer For Me
I was looking for an upgrade in my home studio that brings more joy and fun on my productions. The Apollo Solo interface with all it's universe of plugins it's bringing me that joy again to make music, it's a new world with new colors to me.
Z. Peschos
Good enough for amateurs
Nice interface and very user friendly but a bit temperamental with startup - especially coming back from sleep mode will not always fire up. Gets pretty hot too.
J. Marroquin
Sounds great
I use this as my travel interface. I love that it’s bus powered but it has some issues connecting at first so I have to reboot my MacBook Pro M1 Max a lot sometimes. It’s a pain when I’m doing sessions with clients because it wastes a lot of time just trying to turn on. But once it’s on it’s pretty solid and sounds great. Converters are decent too. It does get pretty hot after about 15 mins of use tho. Doesn’t come with a cable either which is disappointing.
B. Crowley
Exactly what I wanted, but make sure you know what you're buying
I recently purchased the Sphere DLX modeling microphone from UA, and it blew my mind so much I had to buy an Apollo Solo when I found out about all the preamp models that work with their Unison preamps in the Apollo Solo. I have also just plain been wanting a bus-powered interface with amazing preamp emulation forever, and I am more than thrilled that the Apollo Solo both exists and has a reasonable enough price to justify upgrading to it. The sound quality is next level, and from what I understand you won't get better sound quality in the higher end units, just more IO and more powerful DSP chips built-in. The headphone amp is particularly good, which is nice since some of my headphones are very low volume on other audio interfaces I own. The plug-ins that come with this thing, especially during promos, are very plentiful and absolutely top notch. I have yet to use a Universal Audio product that doesn't feel like it's been as perfected as possible.
The main downside and thing to know is that since this is a single core model, you're not going to be able to load many plugins (like 2-3 max, depending on the plugins). Luckily this is all you need to record tracks and flatten them using the analogue preamp running on the DSP chip. The only problem with this approach is that you will pretty much NEED to flatten every track before moving onto the next, since you can't run many preamp emulations at the same time. In most cases this is totally fine, but since I also use a Sphere DLX microphone, I need to flatten the track early with the Sphere plugin first and the preamp/console plugin second, which means I can't change the microphone model later on. This isn't the case if there's a native version of the preamp/console you want to use, but many are not native yet. In any case, this is a very minor complaint for such a great audio interface, but it's definitely worth knowing before purchasing. There is a page on UA's site that lists the CPU usage for every plugin they offer, so it's worth referencing that prior to purchase to see if it will work for you.
R. Chiga
Super portable DSP
I bought this to work at home, super usefull, nice and portable. :-)
I. Gulida
Perfect
Just perfect for my use case - I love it
F. Mannan
Not fit for purpose
I got this in January 2023 for light daily use in a home studio. It stopped working with no explanation in April 2024. Prior to that, I had expressed concerns (to no avail) to both the seller and to UAD themselves that it was a defective unit: somehow the Apollo caused my brand new Mac Studio to kernel panic (crash) every time I left it unattended. If it didn't crash, it would start making strange noises and have to be reset. The software never picked up that the device was registered. It also filled my DAW with hundreds of plugins that I didn't own and were therefore unusable. It didn't work for me.
N. Winterstein
Fender twin plugin soaks recources
My idea was to use the apollo solo with 3 plugins while recording: Fender Twin, compressor LA-2a and Plate reverb. The Apollo solo will not allow that . Beside the Twin only one more plugin can be used. It would work with the Marshal amp but the sound is not suitable for a clean Jazz tone IMO. So I am quite surprized to be honest and not too happy with the purchase.
A. Lefort
Enormément décu
2eme fois que j'ai cette carte son, toujours le même problème qui persiste, la lampe a l'intérieur ne s'allume plus après 4 mois d'utilisation, alors oui certes ca envoi mais sur longévité de vie est pourri.. je suis très déçu...
Finalement c'est triste a dire mais rien ne vaut une bonne scarlette duo...
S. Kallimanis
Industry standard for a reason
I upgraded from a Steinberg interface and the workflow has made a huge difference to my inspiration and saved me valuable time. The included plugins are professional level and was an excellent bonus to my purchase.
t. becker
Pretty good but leaves some to be desired
What would make this interface really good as the word clock
The ability to use unison with external preamps
And call me crazy but this is Universal Audio. I think there should be two tubes in their interfaces
If anyone’s gonna be able to pull off a two channel tube, preamp interface, which it can also be used in the master section
Oh my God dammit should be the descendants of Bill putnam
That, and another thing, I think all audio interfaces are lacking, is the ability to hook up multiple stereo, inputs and outputs for mastering purposes, and transfer purposes
Would have liked to see them carry out this unit like they did the 2192
Which was a force to be reckoned with
A. Little
amazing quality
hands down the best audio interface in its price rang BUT I wish it was class compliant so I could use it with my iPad Pro 12.9 M2 . I know the make ones that will work but id prefer to use the apollo solo with my iPad . @uad if its possible pls make it happen