Apogee on Thursday introduced the Symphony Mobile, a $595 native audio workstation designed specifically for the MacBook Pro. According to Apple and Apogee the speed of the Intel-based MacBook Pro has made many of the hurdles encountered with past machines using Logic Pro a non-issue.
“A number of things have happened over the past year to make this possible,” Rick Moisan, Apple’s Director of Pro Audio Application Product Marketing, told Macworld. “The Intel chip has made the question of power irrelevant for us now.”
Symphony Mobile has all of the performance of the Symphony PCI-Express card with up to 32 channels of I/O. One problem that has plagued users in the past has been with latency issues, which have all but disappeared.
“We’ve gotten the latency to less than 1.6 milliseconds at 96K,” said Alec Little, Apple’s Senior Product Marketing Manager. “It’s not even an issue anymore.”
The Symphony Mobile features 32 channels of 24-bit 192K Digital I/O; direct connectivity to Apogee’s Rosetta 800, Rosetta 200 and AD-16X and DA-16X converters via the optional X-Symphony card; compatibility with any CoreAudio software applications; and Apogee’s VBus for virtual routing between CoreAudio applications, among others.
“We are very excited about Symphony Mobile,” said Betty Bennett, CEO of Apogee. “This product allows professionals the opportunity to make world-class audio productions on their MacBook Pro, whether at home, on the road or in the studio.”
The Symphony Mobile will be released in March 2007.
Editor’s note: Added pricing information