 There's a new kit on the block for premium desktop audio interfaces. Let's take a look at the Antelope Audio ZenQ Synergy Core. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The ZenQ Synergy Core from Antelope Audio is a brand new desktop audio interface which combines high quality hardware with really powerful software, including some onboard latency free effects. Now for most of you, this would be a massive leap forward in terms of both quality and workflow as well. But what makes it so special? Let's start off by taking a look at the hardware. The ZenQ Synergy Core is a 14-in 10-out 24-bit 192 kHz Thunderbolt audio interface. It has an entirely metal casing with a brushed metal top that I rather like. It controls a few but powerful. With a combination of using the three buttons and pressable control knob, we can adjust gain, output levels, switch input modes, turn on phantom power and quite a bit more. And as you've no doubt noticed, the large color display gives us great visual feedback for all that we're adjusting. So the rear we see are first two inputs being XLR and quarter inch combos for mic, line and instrument level inputs. These allow us to record using the two high quality discrete ultra linear preamps with 65 decibels of gain. Next to this we see our main quarter inch balance monitor outputs and next to them a further two quarter inch balanced line outputs. We get another two inputs and two outputs via SPDIF and another eight inputs via ADAT. Finally we see a Thunderbolt 3 connector which also supplies power to the unit. I've been testing this with a PC but of course it's also Mac compatible. At the front of the interface we see another two inputs being for line or instrument level and something which is really nice to see two independent stereo headphone outputs. The ZenQ Synergy Core is built by Antelope Audio in Bulgaria and everything about the build quality feels really solid and premium. So although this interface looks and feels really great, I think it's with the audio quality you start to feel the benefits. The discrete preamps ensure really high quality going in and you've got enough gain there to run things like my shore SM7B without having to use a cloud lifter. But I really think it's with the powerful onboard software that you begin to feel the benefits especially in terms of the built in DSP and FPGA latency free effects. Let's take a look. So here we are looking at the ZenQ Synergy Core control panel. Now this may look very similar to other software that you get with other audio interfaces but it works a little bit differently and the fact that it works differently is where I think a lot of its power comes from and makes it very very useful indeed. But let's start off by looking at the basics. We've got five labels on the left hand side here and they kind of indicate what's going on on the right hand side. So at the top we've got our preamps, we've got our four preamps there in that row. Then we have the label AFX that indicates that this row is for our audio effects. Now I know that's the bit that you're really interested in and I promise we'll get back to that soon. But first of all let's look at the last three labels which are actually switches and they switch between three different mixes. We have one mix here which is for our main monitor and headphones one. Now they share the same mix although you can control the levels separately of course down here. Then we have a different mix for headphones two and another mix for line out okay. Now we're going to stick with the first one here, the main monitor out and headphone one. Now incidentally I actually have an output from this going to another audio interface so I can record this and you can hear exactly what I'm hearing. Now let's go right back up to the top and first of all look at the preamps. We have our four preamps. Now the way we use these is quite straightforward if we look at the second one here we can switch between different types of input. So we've got mic here. We can go to line or we can go to high Z or instrument level there. We'll go back to mic and you can see here if we click on the little mic icon that brings up another little interface here and we can switch our phantom power often on there. There may have been a little click there and then we can switch our phase here and if we do have one of the modeling mics that Antelope Audio make we can switch between those here. I don't have any of those at the moment. I hope to review some of those for you in the future but that's where you would select them there. Okay so that's pretty straightforward and we can control our level there. I'm sure you're using these kinds of things. Now where it gets really interesting is this. I bet you assumed that these four mic preamps line up with these faders down here but they don't. I want you to think of these as sources and think of these as inputs and the reason I'm saying that is because your door will see these eight faders you can see here at the moment as your inputs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 but you don't necessarily have to have say preamp 1 on input 1. You could have anything on input 1 or any of your sources on input 1 so we could switch well in fact we'll do it with input 2. We'll switch input 2 from preamp 2 to preamp 1. Now if I start talking things got a little bit louder I'll mute that. They got a little bit louder because now you can see that the microphone I'm speaking through which is preamp 1 is now on input 1 and input 2. Okay you may be wondering well why would you do that? Well one example of why you would do that is you could now apply effects to input 1 and not to input 2 that means in your door you could record them separately so you could record this microphone completely dry with no effects and also record it on another channel in your door or another track in your door with effects applied you could go both of them or just one of them up to you. If you just want a dry sound recorded and you want to hear the effects through your headphone you can do that. If you just want to go ahead and record that wet signal that you're hearing through your headphones you can do that. So that's a kind of nice versatile way of doing it okay so we can switch in other words sources or assigned sources to different inputs and as I say they could be preamps like this or as you can see they could be the microphones that we talked about earlier they could be outputs from your door you can loop them back into inputs here now that's really interesting we're going to touch upon that later you're probably already thinking oh so you could kind of create a loop with effects on it that's right now moving on from there you could assign ADAT inputs there you could do SPDIF inputs you could mute it and you've also got a couple of oscillators as well for sort of test tones if you're like for when you're setting up equipment. So that's really versatile and very very different now let's talk about the effects there's two basic effects that I'm going to talk about first of all um of course you want to know about the effects that you can insert here but before we talk about that let's talk about another effect which we have on board which is a reverb okay now we get to that by clicking up here for or a verb I'll just click on that and you can see the interface pops up there here now why is this different to everything else well this cannot be used as as an effect in your door or anything this is just for while you're tracking this is really handy lots of singers especially will find that they perform a little bit better if they've just got a touch of reverb in their headphones while they're performing but that's often not something you'd want to record into your door so we've got that here at the moment it's switched off if I just switch it on you can hear the effect here okay fine now there's lots of options there you can change that a lot here and you can control how much of the channel that you're using at the moment with this send here goes to the reverb so you can have reverb on some things not on others so that's a very very cool feature and I think it sounds really nice and that definitely does help the performance of singers especially but it could be guitarists etc as well of course now that's one effect which is just as I say on board and for the headphones the main effects get inserted in here so all we have to do here is click on this space brings up this sort of effects rack if you like here and then we can start adding in effects so let me go ahead and just go and pop in let's say a compressor I'll just choose that pop that in there and there we have a FET A76 compressor let's go ahead I could put in say a guitar amp here just like that and say a guitar cabinet here the guitar plugins by the way are some of the the 37 plugins that you get with this interface for free so if you're a guitarist this is a big bonus it means you don't have to worry about latency anymore when you're recording your electric guitar very very cool indeed so you can see the usual controls for an amp there you can do things like move your mics around change the microphones etc etc now by the way I should just quickly mention some of the technology involved here because there are two basic types of effects chips on board with these synergy core products from Antelope the first is DSP FX which I think is kind of industry standard and then there is the what are they called the FPGA FX almost forgot there the FPGA FX are a different type of processing now they use a combination of these two I have to say you don't really know have to know any of this but I believe that the FPGA FX are really really powerful give you a lot more processing power than DSP FX they use a combination of the both here as of both here and as I say it's seamless you don't really need to know about but it does mean the main thing you need to understand is that you get a lot more effects processing power on these units than you're used to seeing on a lot of other units okay so just worth knowing from that point of view so we can actually on this one channel insert up to eight effects here on this one channel okay and as you can see there's all kinds of different effects there you get 37 effects with the unit and I think there's like another 50 or so that you can actually purchase as well so you can have eight effects on that channel and then you can go ahead and put another eight effects on any of these first six channels that you can see here okay so that's a lot of effects being used in real time while you're tracking now it's really handy to have effects while you're tracking and it's great to be able to record those effects those effects or not but what about using these effects and using the processing power of this unit while you're mixing well there's a couple of different ways that you can go about doing that there is the completely free out of the box way of doing it which is not really difficult but a little more difficult than the second way which I'm going to be able to tell you about which is probably free under a lot of circumstances that's confusing isn't let's just look at the first method which is completely free now I'm going to demonstrate this in studio one because the way it's done in studio one here is the same way that you can do it in any other door except with studio one there's another way of doing it which is just a little bit easier I'm going to show you that quickly but first of all let's look at the way we've got things set up with the zenq control panel this is very important for inputs three and four here okay I have the sources as computer play three and four they could be any other number I've chosen three and four for both the outputs and the inputs so this is as if we've taken a cable from the back of the interface and then plugged it straight back into one of the inputs creating a kind of a loop except there's no cables involved this is all done kind of virtually from within the software here so it's very important we understand that now I've just got one effect on there the veq 1a this is just an eq and I've just boosted the highs in there this is so we can easily hear what's going on okay so that's the control panel there now here in studio one I have some drums here on channel one I'll quickly play those for you that's just so we've got something to listen to while we do this now I also need to show you the way I've set up my inputs and outputs here in studio one I'll just open the interface for that here so for the inputs I've got just the regular preamp set up on one and two I could have set up in a different way but then for three and four as a stereo input I've got that computer play remember going through there so I've made sure I've got this and this is called effects return here I've labeled that effects return okay now for my outputs I have my main outputs which normally going to the main monitors of course and then I've set up two other outputs and I've called them effects send okay they are three and four and that they represent computer play three and four okay that we looked at earlier so that's how we create that kind of loop from within studio one with other doors you can't necessarily label them they just may be called three and four in each of those that's fine so what I'm going to do now is create a send from my drums here I'll just click on that and I'm just going to send them to my effects send so those are computer play three and four now what I'm going to do is just change this to a pre-fader send and I'll just put my fader all the way down so we can no longer hear those drums okay we'll listen yep we can hear nothing that's because we don't have it looped back yet to do that we're going to have to create a new input okay so I'll create a new audio input here in studio one I'll do I'll make a stereo one here because my drums are in stereo I'm using two inputs and outputs for this and then you can see that the input for this is already on effects return it may have come up as something else luckily for me it's the one I want effects return so those are inputs three and four from the zenq okay now we've got this little loop happening I'll have to turn on my direct monitoring here so that we can hear what's happening and if we play the drums now sorry just switch that off we can hear those very tinny drums and that's because over here in the effects I have the boost up on those high frequencies so you can see how that's working there okay um that may seem a little bit complicated we are going to look at an easy way in a moment but first of all let's just look at the easier way in studio one we'll get rid of that second channel there so I'll just remove that track there I'll get rid of my effects send I won't be needing that anymore I'll put my fader back up so we're back to how we were now what we can do in studio one is simply use an insert so I'll just press plus on there to add an insert and I'll go down to this one that we have with studio one called pipeline stereo in this case okay click on that and in pipeline xc here we can just select our send here on one side and select our return on the other side and that's it we're done we can also mix between the two so we're hearing the full effects there I can blend them so you can see that's much easier in studio one but very possible in all doors now all of that may seem a little bit difficult to you a little bit more complex than the way you used to doing things with plugins so luckily there is a way to do it with a plugin which you can get let's talk about that next so this method is super quick and super easy and I think that you can probably get the plugin that I'm about to talk about for free I'm saying probably I'll explain that in a moment but first of all let's look at the method because it really is quite quick to demonstrate I'm here in studio one again I've got my drums again this time we're going to go up to inserts click on plus here and go down to this plugin AFX to DAW this is made by Antlope Audio I'll just insert that there it comes up with this interface similar to what we saw earlier in the control panel it's like an effects rack we can go ahead now and add the effects from Antlope Audio that we were using on it our interface earlier now the cool thing about this is we're using them from within our DAW just like a regular plugin but they're not being processed using our computer CPU or memory they've been processed on our interface they're using the power of our interface freeing up those resources on our computer which is very very handy indeed so why do I keep being sort of cagey about whether this is a free plugin or not at the time I got my interface here there was a special offer on which I could take advantage of where I'd get a few extra plugins and one of them was this AFX to DAW now it's currently listed as costing $199 on the Antlope Audio website but it is included with all of the effects bundles which I had available to me for free now my understanding is from other people Antlope haven't told me this but other people from around the web and on YouTube seem to be saying that these special offers are always on from Antlope Audio so it turns out that while I was editing this video Antlope Audio did in fact announce another bundle available for free with this interface it does include AFX to DAW as well as a bunch of other really cool things that goes on until the end of September at the time of making this video so check the link in the description down below for that and it kind of makes everything else I was about to say about this irrelevant so we'll go on to the next part now as I mentioned this is a Thunderbolt 3 interface and it's partly because of that technology that we get the advantages we do now it does mean that you'll have to double check that your hardware is compatible with Thunderbolt 3 and that likely means whether using PC or Mac that you're going to need a fairly recent model now the other thing I wanted to mention was to do with the installation because it works a little bit differently to other audio interfaces that I've used you have to initially install their launcher and register the device before use now I think this is worth mentioning because I did follow the instructions really carefully but it struck me that if I'd made assumptions I could have come unstuck now I didn't have to end up contacting support or anything like that I did manage to get it all up and running but I did follow those instructions so I recommend that you do too whilst the price of the ZENQ Synergy Core would be a significant investment for most of you it does deliver in terms of hardware quality audio quality and really powerful features as well tracking with the on-board latency free effects is an absolute joy especially if you're a vocalist or an electric guitarist and honestly once you've tracked in this way it's hard to go back to the old way of doing things they also provide a really healthy number of plugins to get you going as well now in terms of other audio interfaces in this class there's really not that much competition but this does compete really well in terms of the initial cost and the cost of the plugins that you may wish to buy at a later date so it's definitely worth weighing all of that up now let me know what you think in the comments down below and also check the links in the description for places you can buy this and also the current prices as well thank you so much for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video