It’s all about the latency, right? At least when it comes to composing, recording, and performing our music using a Mac. Whether that happens to be a symphony, modern jazz, or molten metal, the system with the lowest latency wins every time, because nothing spoils the groove like being out-of-sync with your master track. Apogee Electronics, a company that’s hugely respected for its pristine audio quality, announced that a new Universal Binary driver is available for its Symphony 32-channel PCI-Express card. The driver is designed to take special advantage of the power and technology offered by Apple’s new Intel-based Mac Pro 3.0GHz and the Mac Pro 2.6GHz to achieve performance levels previously unattainable in native audio. How fast is it? Glad you asked. Apogee’s driver, in combination with the powerful Intel processors in the Mac Pro, lowers the latency of the Symphony PCI-Express card by over 50% into the 2ms range. To you and I, that’s effectively zero latency. With the Symphony PCI-E and a Mac Pro, you’ll experience twice the power and performance of other systems, but at half the cost. In our book, that’s pretty cool.