01/01/2025
Hi Friends,
I've just completed my review of the Antelope Zen Quadro.
This Facebook group is where I'm 100% authentic. I'll post stuff here that for various reasons I won't say on YouTube. Since my Zen Quadro review video is sponsored (they sent it to me for free), I'm kind of obligated to provide a positive review. That's the nature of YouTube... it's algorithm and culture promote crap content, and if I don't play along then my channel won't grow, and most of you probably wouldn't have ever found my videos. I still am authentic on YouTube... but I found myself being slightly less authentic with a sponsored video than I would have been if I had purchased it.
I'll probably be avoiding sponsored videos in the future for this reason... but hey... the invite is there on my video to join this group, and I won't hold anything back here.
There's 1 test that I left out of the video because the interface performed only average. That's the noise floor of the preamps. They performed about the same as Focusrite Scarlett Gen 4 preamps, which are still very good, but not at the same level as other high end interfaces. However, the preamps transparancy test where I re-record the same signal 50 times was so good on the Zen Quadro that it's making me think maybe having an ultra low noise floor doesn't matter as much as I thought, because despite having a slightly higher noise floor, these preamps were the very best performers on the transparency test. The noise floor is still extremely low, like in the same neighbourhood as like a Neve, great river, and many other expensive boutique preamps.
There's another test I left out because my testing might have been flawed, and I simply ran out of time to re-test. That's the latency of the direct monitoring. I forget the exact values... but it was the most latency of any interface I tested... around 5 ms at 44.1khz. I'm pretty sure my testing was accurate, but I emailed antelope to confirm and they indicated it should be less than that, but they didn't provide me with the actual numbers. Anyways... this test doesn't really matter... 5 ms is nothing, it's imperceivable. The only time latency is an issue is when people don't use direct monitoring, and the amount of latency is mostly dependant on the computer not the interface, so that's why I don't think latency of an audio interface matters. I only do this test so that my audience can see that I didn't forget to talk about latency, otherwise I get a bunch of dumb complaints in the comments.
This is one of the most innovative audio interfaces on the market. See how the Zen Quadro compares to other high end audio interfaces based on controlled tes...
