The Apogee Element 24 is a super portable interface designed to drop your latency to near zero and work seamlessly within your Mac audio production setup. Two-stage preamps provide fantastic detailed sound quality in your recordings. Despite a potentially polarizing decision to not include physical controls, this may just be the right audio interface for your mobile recording needs.
Pros
- Super clean two-stage preamps
- Seamless integration with Logic Pro X
- Incredibly portable
Cons
- Requires external AC power
- Lack of physical controls may be annoying for some
As far as connectivity goes you’ve got two XLR/6.3mm jack combo mic inputs with optional +48v phantom power, a single optical input with ADAT, SMUX & SPDIF support, two balanced XLR outputs, a single optical output with ADAT, SMUX & SPDIF support and a single 6.3mm headphone jack for monitoring.
There’s Word Clock in and out for anyone who needs to synchronize their gear. The whole thing connects to your Mac via a single thunderbolt port.
The design of this interface is very sleek and professional, it really matches the aesthetic of the Apple hardware it’s designed to go with. Build quality is pretty rock solid, this is a well-built box that shouldn’t have any problem taking the odd knock or scrape.
Controls
This is a really unusual audio interface, in that Apogee have not actually included any physical controls at all on the unit. This may not be the box for you if you’re a really tactile person.
Instead, you’ll need to install the Apogee control software on your Mac to manipulate the device settings, you can also control it from the Logic Pro X mixer when the software is installed. A companion iOS app is available for all of your mobile producers out there. In case you hadn’t realized, this interface is aimed solidly at people who use Apple gear for their productions.
The digital minimalism approach is somewhat refreshing in a world full of knobs and switches. If you live and breathe software we think you’ll really like the Element 24.
Don’t worry if you absolutely hate the software-first approach. You can purchase the optional Apogee Control USB hardware remote separately to restore those physical controls. You might find this worthwhile if you really want that sweet thunderbolt connectivity.
Sound quality
The Apogee Element 24 uses a two-stage type preamp. What this means is that an initial first stage is used for low gain and switching, the second stage then comes into play when the high gain is needed. In practical terms, this means that the preamps are very quiet and detailed.
You get 24-bit/192 kHZ recording in this unit, which when combined with those beautiful preamps results in very high quality and detailed recording. We loved just how much you can pull out of recordings made with this interface.