Apollo Studio Background
I get a lot of questions in my e-mail about how all the stuff in my studio works. So I decided to write a series of articles on my website about this item. I made this schematic that globally shows how all the equipment is interconnected. I will go more in dept in the following sub-articles in the sub-menus. When you click on the picture of the schematic you will get a bigger version. I hope it is clear enough. I used different colors to show the different protocols that are used. Please keep in mind that one line doesn't mean it is just one wire. It is just a logical layout. It can represent more connections that all would do the same thing.
Here already some colors and what they represent:
- Red - Analog audio
- Blue - Digital audio (SPDIF or AES/SBU 2 channels of audio in one fiber)
- Green - ADAT (8 channels of digital audio in one fiber)
- Dark Yellow - MADI (64 channels of digital audio in one fiber pair)
- Purple - Word Clock
- Gray - Midi
- Dark Magenta - USB
- Dark Purple - Firewire
Some colors are a bit difficult to distinguish, but the sub-articles will explain it all. What you can discover from this picture is that the audio path in the schematic is going from left to right. starting at the synthesizers and ending at the monitor speakers. And the midi and USB is running between the synthesizers, FX and the Midi interfaces and A880's.
The most important thing to see is that almost everything is done in the PC now and almost everything is digitized as soon as possible. This is off course a choice I made based on experiences in the past, where I had trouble with noise and hum coming from way too long and way too much copper wires carrying analog audio signals. This setup also eliminates the need of the extra analog mixer and digital mixer I used to have that took a lot of space in the studio.