DAD’s new AX Center is a dedicated Thunderbolt modular audio interface with dual mic and instrument inputs, dual headphone and monitor outputs built-in Pro|Mon monitor control with loudspeaker EQ and two slots for DAD expansion cards. The unit offers 256 Thunderbolt 3 channels, 256 Dante I/O channels, up to 192 Madi I/O channels and 16 Adat channels, as well as onboard summing and processing.
‘AX Center was born to sit in a rack right next to you in the studio – maybe even on your desktop – or in your portable recording rig,’ says Sales Director, Mikael Vest. ‘Basically, it unites the distinguished audio quality of our A/D and D/A conversion with the transparency and musicality of our mic preamps and our flexible digital audio I/O infrastructure.’
The Pro|Mon section of the complimentary DADman control software gives access to a 512x64 channel summing processor, while built-in SPQ processing offers 128 channels with a total of 1,024 EQ filters, as well as delay for accurate speaker correction in the studio.
The internal routing matrix of the DADman software spans 984x984 channels, allowing any input to be routed to any output, or duplicating and routing to several different destinations simultaneously.
Finally, the Thunder|Core connection has a Hardware latency of nine samples, 32-bit floating-point resolution, and is capable of handling up to 256 bidirectional channels at 48kHz and 96kHz, 128 at 192kHz and 64 channels at 384kHz. It also supports Apple Silicon processors, macOS Big Sur and forward with a Core Audio driver, as well as Windows 10 and forward with an ASIO Thunder|Core driver.
‘The sheer audio quality of our AD/DA converters and transparency of our preamps origin form back in the days of high-res DXD audio recording for SACD that made the audio file community embrace us years ago,’ Vest says. ‘And in parallel, the complex audio infrastructure facilities in post production and broadcast saw the benefits of our flexible audio-routing and digital format conversion. Now, with AX Center we take the best from both worlds, offering a compact 1U interface with built-in DAD AD/DA conversion and mic preamps, as well as flexible DADman routing, monitor control, DSP-processing and the option to add even more I/O flexibility via two expansion slots.
‘At the end of the day, it’s all about capturing the source truthfully and get it into whatever DAW you may be using exactly as it is, and the high-res and near-zero latency technology of our Thunder|Core implementation provides just that. We see a demand for this in many production environments, in the studio and on the road.’
More: www.digitalaudio.dk
