Apogee Delivers New PCI-Express Driver For High Performance, Low Latency Audio On Mac Pro

Aug 08, 2006

Click image for closeup

Apogee Electronics Corporation announced today a new high performance PCI-Express driver for their 'Symphony' 32-channel PCI-Express card. This Universal Binary driver is designed to take special advantage of the power and technology in Apple's new Intel-based Mac Pro to achieve performance levels previously unattainable in native audio.

"We are very excited about the power and capability of the Mac Pro," says Betty Bennett, Co-Founder and CEO of Apogee. "The combination of the Mac Pro and our Symphony PCI-Express card delivers on the promise of high performance native audio for professionals."

"The newly designed Mac Pro delivers quad-Xeon performance, greater expansion, high-end workstation graphics and unprecedented customization to fit the wish lists of the most demanding user," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations. "We're delighted Apogee has taken advantage of the innovative architecture and blazing speed of the Intel-based Mac Pro to deliver powerful professional audio performance with Symphony."

Apogee's new Universal PCI-Express driver, in combination with the powerful Intel processors in the Mac Pro, lowers the latency of the Symphony PCI-Express card by over 50% into the 2ms range. This achievement is a significant increase in performance beyond other native solutions on the market and compares favorably to the latency on other hardware-based systems.

The Mac Pro architecture in combination with the Symphony PCI-E card's high channel count and low latency surpasses all competitors in performance and value. With up to 4 internal SATA drives, the Mac Pro can be setup as a striped RAID, making recording and playback at high channel counts with high sample rates a breeze. The power of the two Dual-Core Intel Xeon chips gives you more plug-ins, and more soft synths, with even lower buffer settings than ever before. Symphony PCI-E and the Mac Pro deliver twice the power and performance of other systems, at half the price. Symphony PCI-Express Card at a glance:

• 32 channel PCI-Express card, capable of 24-bit 192k Digital I/O
• Single 32 channel PC-32 bi-directional connector from converter to computer
• Direct connectivity to Apogee's Rosetta 800, Rosetta 200 and AD-16X and DA-16X converters via the option card
• Universal binary driver compatible with Apple's new Mac Pro hardware
• Apogee's Maestro Software for advanced control and routing
• Compatibility with all CoreAudio software applications

For more information, visit their web site at www.apogeedigital.com.