Closer Look: Antelope Audio Orion 32

Antelope Audio has released a pretty amazing interface. It’s hands down the most comprehensive and capable USB audio interface I’ve ever worked with. It also does a great job at negotiating the analog and digital world, providing ample inputs of both types, and letting you stay in synch with your digital devices. It manages to do all of this with supreme analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions.

The Orion 32 is a single rack-space unit that packs a punch. From the analog end, it can handle up to 32 line-level inputs. These are fed into the interface using 25-pin D-ub connectors, which can be wired to breakouts of your choosing. Clearly, to stay in 1 rackspace, they couldn’t fit 32 XLR jacks on the unit itself. The Orion can also output 32 line level analog signals.

In the digital domain, you have two sets of ADAT I/O, allowing you to input or output 16 channels digitally. Additionally, you can use Fiber Optic MADI to send and return up to 32 tracks from a single unit. There is also a set of S/PDIF I/O for basic stereo digital connections.

Okay, so it can send and receive a lot of signals, but here’s the more impressive part: Using a custom USB-chip, the Orion 32 can handled 192 kHz streaming of 32-channel digital audio via its USB port, connecting to any USB-enabled digital audio workstation. The award-winning analog-digital converters are incredibly clean and sound virtually transparent. You can also send and return audio over MADI with varying track counts and sample rate maximums from 16 channels at 192 kHZ to 32 channels at 96 kHz.  All of this is handled with low latency performance, with Antelope reporting that, when simultaneously sending and receiving 32 channels of audio, latency was between one and six and a half milliseconds, depending on the different hardware and software with which the Orion 32 was being used.

To round it all out, the Orion 32 can provide top notch master clocking to your entire system. It has Antelope’s proprietary clock technology on board, providing a 64-bit acoustically focused clock and supreme clocking stability. For distribution to your system, there are four Word Clock Outputs on the back of the Orion 32 and two inputs should you decide to use a different clocking source.


I used the Orion 32 to make a multi-track recording of a musical I was designing. I used an ADAT card and routed discrete signals out of my console and into the Orion 32. I also used the Orion as my master clock, synching my console and playback interfaces to the Orion. I recorded into my laptop via USB, running ProTools 9. I’ve had issues with disk speed on my aging laptop before, but with the Orion 32, recording 16 tracks didn’t seem to be a problem.

I will say that I could have used better guidance in the Orion’s setup application. Any device with this amount of I/O requires some patching and set up, no doubt. In the end, I found the software interface to be powerful, but it seems it was designed by people who already knew how it worked. For a new user, I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how get it configured properly. While it looks clean, not everything is labeled and I didn’t find it intuitive.  Lots of squares and colors, and I knew I needed to connect the dots, but I didn’t know how.  In the moment, I didn’t find much help in the manual or online, although now I see there are video tutorials available online.  I wouldn’t mention it, except I feel like I’m smarter than your average bear when it comes to computers and patching, and I’ve found other developers software to be much clearer. That said, once I got it patched, signal came right to ProTools, and I was off and running. You can also adjust hardware levels in the setup application, as well as save and recall up to five presets.

Most importantly, it sounded great. Really great. My tracks were super-clean, and I could hear all of the good and the bad without any coloring from the interface. However, since there’s no headphone jack, so I couldn’t monitor any of the inputs into the Orion while it was recording. This is another slight bummer, and although I understand with this high track count, it would be hard to provide comprehensive monitoring.

Last but not least, since the Orion is completely Apple Core Audio compliant, you can also use the Orion 32 with an iPad. Crazy, but true. I haven’t tried it, but Antelope says that, by using Apple’s USB-connection kit, you can record up to 24 tracks at once, into your iPad. I hope you sprang for one with a larger hard drive. Going from the small to the big, if you need more than the 32 tracks, you can link two Orion’s together, using the MADI connections, and double your track count.  Now we’re talking 64 streams at 48 kHz in two rack spaces.

This world is getting insane. And the team at Antelope just launched the Orion 32 into outer space. I was sad to send my demo unit back.