Reviews for Apogee ONE USB Microphone and Music Interface

As soon as I opened the box, the Apogee ONE looked amazing, highly polished finish, great solid feel, and ready to go.

I plugged it in, fired up Logic, plugged in my Gibson Les Paul Custom into the Apogee ONE, and oh my, what pristine excellence came into the headphones.

The clarity of the sound is as if I am finally getting value out of the beautiful craftsmanship of my guitar, that coupled with the effects in Logic, it's like who needs amps or pedals anymore, in fact I decided to sell them all.

But the reality of the matter is that none of this would be possible without the Apogee ONE. It is made for your instrument, I haven't tried the built-in mic because I have a condenser USB mic that works great, but you can see what others have to say about it.

Final words: Quality/Feel: 10/10, Setup/Ease of Use: 10/10, Audio Quality: 10/10, Portability: 10/10.

There is nothing more you could want whether at home or on the road.

Thank you Apogee.

108 of 117 people found this useful

Simple, great drivers, excellent sound. Yes you do need to launch the Maestro app to select the input off the fan out cable, but that is not the hassle in my experience that others have said. The mic preamp is really good. It works very well as the guitar interface for GarageBand, Logic and Mainstage.

Yes it's twice the price of a comparable offering from M-Audio who make good offerings, and the Duet is 1.6x the price of competitive FireWire interfaces. I find the Mac integration superior and so long as you understand the limitations of the ONE, (one interface at a time, plastic as opposed to metal) it's a great solution. Yes FireWire is better, yes FireWire has lower latency, but USB 2 is fine for a single interface. I also found that while there is not a specific output for power monitors, I have used a stereo adapter into the headphone jack to drive M-Audio monitors and it works very well.

35 of 38 people found this useful

Holy moly, what a great little interface. This thing is the size of an iPod and packs quite a punch. This thing has a built in condenser mic that is surprisingly high quality. It produces a great warm sound and picks up all the natural highs and lows. I recorded two interviews and my flute and they sound great. I can plug in guitars, basses, keyboards, and a separate mic to this thing. These also sound great.

However, this thing is not without a small flaw. My only gripe is that it does not support balanced studio monitors but otherwise is a great interface. If you would like to, you could use a usb hub to daisy chain a bunch of these together. Don't know the benefits of this but would be kind of cool. 9 1/2 stars out of 10.

19 of 20 people found this useful

I heard the One in a Tokyo music store today and instantly knew that I had to have it. I bought this unit home, loaded the software up, dialed up an iTune track and WOW! The veil on my computer music has totally been lifted. The clarify and depth of the music, along with an excellent sound stage, can now be truly appreciated due to the pro quality 24-bit AD/DA converters. I was totally blown away when I compared how my music sounded coming out of the Apple headphone jacks vs the One into my Tascam VL-M3s. So much for the output quality. My next test included checking the instrument line level input recording quality. Plugged my piccolo bass guitar directly into it and recorded some jazz tracks into Logic Express 8. Again, WOW! Clean and clear as a whistle. This little beast makes recording music with a computer exciting again. One wish though: if only Apogee would include a 1/8 phono to stereo RCA jack cable in the package. However, the quality and looks are well worth what I paid. I've been researching and checking audio interfaces for my computer and small powered monitors for six months and I would honestly say that nothing in this price range even comes close. Well done Apogee!

15 of 16 people found this useful

I use Mainstage 2 in my band to do all of my electric guitar effects since it is a lot more convenient that carrying around my 83lbs amp. I tried using my line in but it made some very annoying and unwanted distortion fuzz sound. I then got an Apogee on to try if it got rid of the white noise sound. And it did. Although I do not use the internal mic at all the line in preamp interface works very very good. I would recommend it to anyone who needs a good preamp interface to use with Mainstage or to record individual tracks. Especially since it's cheaper than the Duet.

12 of 13 people found this useful

I really like this product a lot. It's compact (really compact) and sounds great. I recorded some vocal tracks the other day to test the mic and was quite impressed with the results. I get totally lost listening to tracks from my iTunes collection. Get yourself a decent pair of headphones and hear the difference. Plug in a good mic and wow. I haven't played any instruments through the One yet but I'm sure I'll be impressed. Take it anywhere, looks cool, sounds great, this is the one!

13 of 15 people found this useful

The One rocks. My band and I can't afford studio time so we decided to take matters into our own hands by investing in the One. It can record anything from drums to acoustic and the quality is mind blowing every time... especially if you're used to the built in mic on your mac. Thanks to the One, we can record whatever we want, whenever we want and we're finally able to put out a quality demo without being held back by the restrictions of low quality recording gear. It's the quality we deserve at a price we could afford! It looks pretty sexy sitting on your desk too... if that counts for anything.

9 of 12 people found this useful