It’s been long enough where I’m ready to come clean about my Apogee Duet
. Despite being a (sometimes) convenient little interface with a great mic-pre, the Duet suffers from a significant design fail. The Duet is one of Apogee’s first real forays into making an entry level/affordable audio interface and the device looks very attractive (as if it was designed by the magic elves at Apple or something), but upon closer inspection you see a different story. Most pics of the Duet you see look like this. But our accompanying pic is REALLY what the device looks like. You can braid them, keep them straight, put them in pony tail or leave them natural, but regardless of what you do, this Medusa-like cluster of wires is very annoying. Now for some users I realize this is not even an issue – you tuck the wires behind your desk and never see them. But for those who move the device around quite a bit, it can be a real pain. First off, the wires are not very long, so they always tend to be pulling on the main plug itself when you have your instrument or speaker cables attached – although mine hasn’t shorted out yet, it seem inevitable. Further, the wires are ALWAYS tangled and even worse, all the IN and OUT plugs are white! Try finding the difference between an instrument IN and a speaker OUT in the dark (on stage) without color coding – even differentiating between R and L speaker OUT is difficult. Certainly a case of form over function, Apogee and it’s users would better be served by making the device a little larger and doing away with that rat’s nest of nasty wires.
