Antelope Discrete 4 Pro Synergy Core

The best card in this price range!

I have the previous model in use and, frankly speaking, it suited me in everything except the thunderbolt2 port and the presence of only 4 afx slots. The new discrete 4 pro has everything I need, a thunderbolt 3 port has appeared and now the device has 16 afx slots.

The priamps are very clean, their sound is just something incredible, even budget microphones start to sound much more expensive through them!

In terms of AFX processing, their plugins sound fantastic and the library has just about everything you need to get the job done.

The disadvantages of this device is the lack of a Thunderbolt 3 cable.

And one more, but for me a very serious minus is that having bought discrete 4 pro for the promotion and having received a full set of afx plugins, I cannot use these plugins on my old card! I don’t know what it is connected with and why they did it, but this is a very unpleasant moment! When buying a new card, I expected that I could use all the plugins on my old card. Now both cards are registered on my Antelope account, but all plugins work only on the new one!

Serious contender to Number 1 for home studio

What I knew about DSP powered interfaces? They are complex, hard to learn and in the end, are they very helpful with their DSP processing? Now I know the answer is yes. What I love Discrete 4 Pro SC for? 4 discrete preamps with 65 db gain provide more solid(honest) sound than opamp chips. Inputs types(Pre, Hi-Z, Line) switched by relay to minimize noise! 16 FX slots(AFX) can be loaded with up to 8 plugins each and their inputs assigned to any input or output. Everything after that can be summed on 4 mix buses and got on 24 channel slots in DAW with USB and 32 slots for Thunderbolt. Great! You and your singer/performer may listen dry or wet different mixes and different mixes or dry signals can be routed to DAW for recording! Buffer size can be lessed to 8 samples. Honestly I didn't find it useful at least with USB. USB reported latency for 44k/16 samples is 75/59 samples or 1.70/1.34 ms in/out. Measured RTL - 17 sampels more. And with 32 samples buffer size the RTL measured on USB increased only up to 3.5 ms. It's just a dream! And everything works flowlessly as I need it with HP Victus notebook (CPU AMD 5600h, 32 Gb RAM). 4 independent headphone amps can drive 300 Ohm of HD600 easily! 65 db gain and huge dynamic range may give you a good tone even on low signal microphones. I took also Ultimate FX pack on sale. And now I have about 70 astounishing FX processors to use in the recording. Microphone emulations may be not suiable for every taste. But if use Edge Note SDCs than the emulation of Neumann KM 184 SDC is a great choice. Do I trust to Anteloipe FX also mixing and mastering? Not yet, but need to check. I got interface only 1 week ago but already had 1 stage performance using mic pres before X32 console and one studio recording with 2 singers. Excellent results!

Update after 1 month. After buying this device, I urgently needed Discrete 8 because of the larger number of channels :-)