Universal Audio Apollo Twin X DUO Heritage Edition 10x6 Thunderbolt Audio Interface with UAD DSP Reviews

I started recording on a Scarlett 2i2 back in the day, and this was my first major upgrade almost 4 years ago. I can't understate the major fidelity jump between this and the Scarlett. Half the time I don't end up using a preamp emulation because it sounds so good straight in.

IMO this is the best mid-tier interface you can buy. It's expandable with ADAT, the conversion sounds great, and the headphone amp is superb.

It's been more than 6 months working with the Apollo, no problems and it is a solid piece of gear. Great for all the extra software as well.

I've been using Universal Audio products for years and will continue too. Clean audio signals. I would definitely recommend to anyone looking for a quality sound.

I love this interface, upgraded this from a focusrite scarlett 2i2 . A little bit expensive but it was worth every penny. It came with plug-ins also it was a sale with more plugin so I was able to get autotune advanced and many more plugins for free. Thank you Sweetwater for everything.
P.S. I would only buy the Apollo from sweetwater they was nice to even give me a thunderbolt cable

So, yeah, because I am a fan, my review is biased. I've been using an Apollo Twin for years, so it was a no brainer to update to the X. Thank you Justin Sunday and Sweetwater for taking care of the details.

its amazing! hasn't failed in one way. when I expand my outboard gear, ill be sure to keep this for the daisy chain connectivity & to use as a monitor controller based on the simple fact that I've never had an issue of any kind, with this monster. read the manual because the customiziation of buttons is a game changer for your work flow.

Well first off , I'm a little peaved by my friends in the music and Voice Artist business who didn't tell me earlier to switch from the very capable Duet 3. Apogee products are great , but this Apollo X with thunderbolt is awesome . Tons of excellent plug-ins, zero latency , powerful, flexible and ease of use … plus it has a stand alone power switch . Buy this , you will thank me !

It took me awhile to get everything set correctly in my computer. If you are using Windows there's quite a bit of setup.
But I did finally get it all done and this interface is phenomenal! The sound is amazing. The plugins, the console, it all adds up to a great system. This will no doubt improve your recordings as well as your mixes. You can use the Console to do a lot of set up before you record. Leads to a fantastic signal to record within my DAW. Highly recommended.

For live streaming the sound quality is great! We had an Apogee Quartet and Duet 2 which was very nice, but nowhere near the quality of the Apollo Twin X.

If you have a Mac then I would strongly recommend this product!

I had heard this unit used by a friend of mine. And it sounded incredible. I bought one myself along with a Mac Studio. I am always concerned with product support, however in this case I had a little difficulty installing some of the plug-ins however that was my unfamiliar rarity, I did contact Universal audio support and they got back with me very shortly and were able to help me walk through what I was missing. So my product support concerns were unmerited. Hats off to Universal audio. Money well spent

This is the most awesome interface I have ever used. Paired with either Studio One or Luna you will find this hard to beat. Can't wait to purchase more UA Plugins for this beast. Unbeatable item for your recording studio. Would like to thank Alan Moon for his help and advice.. Otherwise, I would have probably wound up with an inferior product. I ALWAYS trust his expertise and advice in studio-related items as well as just about anything else I've purchased from Sweetwater..He has recorded with some great musicians... He has not disappointed yet!!!

I tried an Apogee Duet 3 with my new Mac Mini M1 but it wasn't reliable. After owning this UA Apollo Twin for a couple of months I can say that I've had 'zero' issues. The setup was easy. If you have the funds... buy this. The sound is pristine. Not sure how it could be any better.

As a 50yr old songwriter, I often think back to when I was a teenager, recording my 1st demo on a tascam portastudio. Any piece of gear back then was just sOoOo expensive. Fast forward. I am now using a UA Apollo Twin X Duo along with Apple's Logic Pro and have music on Apple and Spotify that sound just as well recorded as the big named artists in million dollar studios. It's a GLORIOUS time to be alive and be a musician. Universal Audio has you covered from your 1st song to your biggest album. It's literally plug in (pun intended) and play!

Tried many interfaces in the past.. Plain and simple Universal Audio is by far the best!

Quality is top notch! Their plugins are the best too and tracking with this baby is amazing.

Will always be a huge Uad fan for sure!

Bought one , sold it. thinking i'd find something different. ended up buying another one and sticking with it

I purchased this for one of my producers who moved to Dallas. We wanted a product that will give a great sound but allow him to record and edit in his home studio. Wow!!!, this thing wows great. He has composed music to a few Grammy award winner and scored music for a movie on this . All we add to do was upload tracks in the studio and let the vocals began. Love this gear .

When I decided, it was time to replace my 10 year old DAW from another company, I read reviews about Universal
Audio and Sweetwater. I began communicating with Mike Brandt and his team about pairing an interface to a new
iMac M1 with Thunderbolt. The Apollo Twin X was in my price range & fulfilled my needs as a singer/songwriter
with a home recording studio. What makes Sweetwater and UA different is their excellent & timely communication.
I had never experienced that type of pride and professionalism in a company. Both companies in fact. An example,
would be just connection and setting up my system. I first contacted Sweetwater and was connected to Adam in
the tech department. He immediately knew the proper steps to install the new software for UAD & LUNA. We
screen shared my system was up and running within an hour. It doesn't stop there. When I contacted UA, I
was connected to Albert A. What a gentleman. We communicated via email and he provided specific links that helped me adjust to a new DAW. I look forward to a continuing relationship with Sweetwater & UA.

When I decided, it was time to replace my 10 year old DAW from another company, I read reviews about Universal
Audio and Sweetwater. I began communicating with Mike Brandt and his team about pairing an interface to a new
iMac M1 with Thunderbolt. The Apollo Twin X was in my price range & fulfilled my needs as a singer/songwriter
with a home recording studio. What makes Sweetwater and UA different is their excellent & timely communication.
I had never experienced that type of pride and professionalism in a company. Both companies in fact. An example,
would be just connection and setting up my system. I first contacted Sweetwater and was connected to Adam in
the tech department. He immediately knew the proper steps to install the new software for UAD & LUNA. We
screen shared my system was up and running within an hour. It doesn't stop there. When I contacted UA, I
was connected to Albert A. What a gentleman. We communicated via email and he provided specific links that helped me adjust to a new DAW. I look forward to a continuing relationship with Sweetwater & UA.

First of all, I would like to thank Mason Moss for the countless hours spent on helping me find the right audio interface. Truly a great sales executive!

I'm very happy with the card and frequently use the DSP plugins as well the as ones that came along with a vocal promo.

Sweetwater was super kind enough to send in a Thunderbolt 3 Cable along with the interface for free.

NOTE: Windows (10/11) users with a thunderbolt option might want to try it out before buying as it's a "hit/miss" situation.

Otherwise, great sound card! Super happy with this purchase and thank you Sweetwater, for a hassle free purchase!

Clearest audio I've ever encountered. I can literally feel the analog nature of the hardware even when listening to music on spotify. Best purchase ever

I got the UA because of the Unison pre-amp feature: still getting used to the preamps, sounds/settings, to dial in the sound I want. The other plugins are exceptional. Will add more when I have time to preview/audition them. So far, very pleased.

I upgraded from the original Apollo twin to this and my mind was blown by how great this unit sounded. The plugins that come with it for free are absolutely stunning as well. Chris Lewis my sales rep was outstanding and he always goes above and beyond with any questions I have.

As a soon to be recovering gear junkie, this piece of gear completes the LUNA DAW workflow nicely. Only grip I had is that it should be made plain from the git-go that you need this interface to complete the LUNA DAW workflow (that is if you want the Neve summing option which, maybe I inthralled to hype but, sounds soooooo good). Many thanks to the Sweetwater engineers for making things work when they don't. Now all I need is some talent! :-)

I've had this unit for about two years now, so I figured I'd share my two cents. It's unlikely I'll touch on anything that hasn't been said before somewhere online, but hopefully not here.

Let's start with the obvious, this is pretty expensive for most people, especially if you're just starting out recording. I tossed up buying one of these for awhile before making the leap. A lot of me didn't want to spend the money, but also I loved my Audient iD14. This is for sure a step-up from the Audient interface, but not enough to justify the price if you're simply looking to plug and play.

So what makes it a worthwhile upgrade? For me, it's the plug-ins included that justify the price. UAD plug-ins truly are second to none. The price certainly factors in the plug-in bundle included, which offer the closest emulations of some of the most sought after hardware in recording. If the price tag on this unit is somewhat unsettling, it's fair to assume buying the real hardware they're modeled after is out of the question for you.

Now for it's shortcomings (in my opinion). I don't have great room to mic my guitar amp, so a big reason for my purchase was to get better D/I guitar recordings. Although, I'd still say I'm managing to do this; I am not doing it in the way I expected. The reason I say this is because I find the UAD amp sims pretty awful. There's really nothing that makes me want to use them ever. It just seems like an unnecessary amount of work to get a decent tone. Of course a real amp will always sound better, but many of us making home recordings don't have this option. Personally, I find Neural DSP amp sims to be 10x better than anything UAD has available.

I just want to make one more comment and it's about the learning curve involved in going from a cheaper interface to this. They include a software called UAD console. In console you can load up UAD plug-in's and save some CPU load on your computer. This is becoming less of an issue with newer machines, but it's still a nice feature. I am by no means a tech savvy person, but I didn't find console to be very difficult to get the hang of at all. I use Logic Pro X as my DAW. Maybe it's more of a challenge in other DAWs, but if you're worried about figuring out how to use console, I wouldn't let that steer you away from this product.

All in all a great interface especially if you were lucky enough to grab one with the current $300 discount. I unfortunately was not one of those people.

Well I am very grateful to Abraham Sanchez for his patience and help in buying the Apollo twin x interface... and for giving me a good alternative even with handling and shipping, the interface is wonderful in sound quality the accessories are very good and makes any condenser microphone sound better
The only thing I've noticed so far is that the machinery gets really hot but everyone says that's normal for all Universal Audio Pro products...

Great interface but I was expecting the sound quality to be a tad bit better. Probably not a fair comparison but my ears are spoiled from working with Mytek AD & DA convertors which cost twice as much and more. I like the built in talkback feature. The latency is extremely low for live recording. Using the built in UAD effects while recording with zero latency make this interface stand out.

Been messing around with DAWs off and on for a number of years. Before now, I ran on PC with second hand hardware. I got tired of stuff crashing and having to spend more time troubleshooting my rig than actually making music and being creative. I finally decided to take the plunge and switch over to Mac and buy a decent interface.

I grabbed an M1 Mac running Big Sur (16gb/256gb). I didn't think of compatibility issues with it being newly released. Fortunately when the Apollo interface arrived, it seemed to hookup with the M1 without issue. Luna however; crashed the first time I launched it. I ended up downloading Logic and everything works.

Complaints: it would be really nice for UAD to include a midi interface on their boxes so I wouldn't need a separate device. Fortunately I have a separate device but unfortunately it's not yet supported on M1 Mac / Big Sur.

Other complaints: UAD installs every single plugin they offer, whether you are licensed or not. Add a plug-in to your project and have fun guessing what you're licensed for. Unlicensed plugins will load and have a button that says "start demo". Only way around this is to manually delete them out of the plugins folder. Kind of janky.

It does what it's supposed to. I haven't gone too far into the plugins or playing with it yet. It sounds good to my ears but so did my second hand DM-24 with FireWire and so did by Motu 828.

Using this interface with windows is a troubling in itself but let me say if you are using this with a PC that you have built... don't unless you have a lot of time and money on your hands... personally ive had to do a lot of work just to get the interface to work. do i like it? yes i love it! do i think that it should be optimized for using with windows? 100%
I dont understand why they wouldn't have built this for optimization between the main OS options. I understand that certain people have an understanding that MAC OS works really well but even so, that fact that ive had to pay an extra $ just to have my computer recognize that the interface is even plugged in was unexpected.

anyway i do think that if you have been looking at it and if you do a lot of production and recording all the time, this interface is a great option if your use to using a MAC.

I've had this unit for about a year now. Drivers are solid, form factor is great and overall its a stable, decent sounding interface. What I've come to realize over the past year is that I'm not sure that the sound quality of the Apollo series is really that much better than other interfaces I own. Comparisons between the Focusrite Clarett and the MOTU I occasionally use are surprising. Surprising in the sense that at times, the Apollo is the least preferred interface. I'm writing this review not to bash on UAD, but rather to give my experience to prospective buyers. I think its fairly difficult to buy a "bad" sounding interface nowadays and I'm not entirely convinced that the Apollo series is worth the premium price. Also, the architecture of the Apollo series is designed to take one down the "plug-in rabbit hole" which can be an expensive outlay for many not needed things.
In closing, a quality piece of gear (as is most other audio interfaces available) but beware the marketing hype.

If this was a review for the product on only a Mac I'd give it 5 stars but I bought this to work on Windows AND Mac. Ever since trying to switch over to Windows I've had nothing but issues. It feels loike there is always something going wrong with it. On Mac I plug it in and its ready to go. On Windows it's not anywheres as easy. This product is something that should come with a warning to all Windows user so I hope this steers at least 1 Windows user away from making this purchase.

Trying to get this thing working with Logic Pro X and all my usual plug-ins was a nightmare. After hours of watching tutorial videos (from UA as well as YouTubers), I just couldn't figure the thing out. Too complex. Too many settings. Too much work.

I wasted hours messing with this thing and watching tutorial videos... when I could've instead just been recording with my old Scarlett 2i4.

If you're anything like me, and you just want "plug and play" without a bunch of digital complexity, this interface will leave you beating your head against the wall instead of recording.

I guess I'm just not the target customer for this type of interface. So, I sent it back to Sweetwater.

I'd like to mention that first off, if you are going to be using this exclusively with a Mac, this interface is an absolute beast and will be an excellent investment towards your audio setup. Unfortunately, while the interface claims to be compatible with Windows, I'd like to assert that that claim is a bold extension of the truth.

I purchased the B-stock version of this interface through Sweetwater as an upgrade to my Scarlett 2i2. What originally sold me on it (over the USB-C version equivalent) was the incredible DSP capabilities, as well as the fact that I should have been able to use it with both my home Windows PC as well as my Macbook. Unfortunately, I discovered that the interface is only compatible with Windows ASIO drivers. What this means is that while is works perfectly fine with Pro Tools and Ableton (my 2 main DAWs), it isn't compatible with programs that use default windows drivers, meaning no Zoom, no Skype, no Discord, no nothing, which is extremely disappointing if your Windows PC does literally anything in addition to running a DAW.

There is supposedly an unoffical workaround for this which involves downloading some 3rd party digital mixing software, but I couldn't get it to work. The 3rd party program is unstable and crashes, and quite frankly I shouldn't have to get that to work for an interface whose price has 4 digits in it. Unfortunately, this means I ended up returning it, which is an absolute shame for such an incredible piece of technology. I really wanted to love this interface, but I would honestly rather the CEO of UA issue a statement telling windows users to stick it where the sun don't shine then for them to advertise that the product also works with Windows when that's hardly true.

That being said, this again is an amazing interface if you're only going to be using it with your Mac, or if you're going to use it with a PC that EXCLUSIVELY runs DAWs.

Don't buy anything from Univeral Audio. You won't like it. All Universal Audio cares about is selling plug-ins. I think they have about 300 plug-ins and here's the problem. If you are using the Apollo with Logic Pro or Pro Tools, they make it impossible by showing ALL 300 plugins all the time. You want to insert a plug-in on a track? Just click on the "Insert" tab and BOOM all 300 of the Universal Audio shows up and you don't own any of them. There is no way to shut this feature off. It makes it impossible to record tracks. You would think there would be a way to deactivate this feature but there's not. This is an awful product and if you waste your time and money on it you will be sorry.

I have two plugins from universal audio that just stopped working, causing pro tools to crash upon startup as it loads the flawed plugins. Eventually pro tools skips loading the plugins but it takes a long time and now I have useless plugins. One of the plugins is the teletronix LA2a.

UA has a major problem with their SW. Open as many tickets as you like; you won't hear from them. I bought my Apollo Twin MkII Duo in 2021 and had to reload the SW twice before it worked. When I wanted to copy it to another MAC, there was a problem and I hired someone to figure it out. A week later, it still didn't work. Someone told me that the MkII Duo was the problem and I bought an X Duo. What a waste of money that was. The SW still didn't work. I finally got it to work after spending 45 hours reinstalling the SW. I had to remove my MS Office and other programs. Finally, it did. But for 3 weeks now, I have not been able to update the SW. I am not impressed with the company, the HW, and the SW is far worse than anything I have ever seen. If you want some good advice: Stay away from UA! It is not worth it.

I purchase this thinking it will match my brand new Mac Studio. However, in order to install the drivers you are required to go through your recovery system to change security setting. I was not able to change the required settings and when I reached out to support I was told it was now an apple issue. Of course, I returned this unit and upgraded to the always reliable RME system. After installing total mix, everything worked perfectly. I am sure this is a great piece of hardware (once installed), however, the fact that UAD wants us to go through the recovery system to install their drivers is infinitely stupid. Essentially, UAD are giving you a work around for something they were not able to code correctly.

I used my Apollo Twin X with no issues for about half a year but in the past six months an issue started where the interface wouldn't connect to the computer. I've tried reinstalling the software many times and nothing seems to help. When I contact support their response is "yeah, we know it's an issue and it's not fixed." I have now contacted them at least three times in the past six months and their answer is the same. Thanks for the $ paperweight guys. I thought I was getting a UA product so I wouldn't have to deal with this kind of thing. Guess not.