Audient has announced the launch of Horizon, a new flagship Thunderbolt audio interface range that the British company says has been five years in development.
The Horizon range is made up of three models, each housed in a 1U chassis and built on the same core platform with 32-bit AD/DA converters that deliver 133dB of dynamic range.
Horizon 8P is the tracking interface, a 24-in/32-out unit with eight of Audient’s Console mic preamps onboard, offering 75dB of gain and based on the same discrete Class-A design used in the company’s ASP8024-HE console. The 8P’s preamps also feature ORBIT Control, a variable impedance switch with three settings that can bring out different characteristics from your mic collection.
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8P is equipped with eight XLR/TRS combo jacks for mic- and line-level inputs, which are also accessible via two DB25 connectors that handle eight line-level outputs. An additional 16 ins and outs are available via ADAT, alongside four TRS outputs. You also get two Hi-Z instrument inputs and dual headphone outputs on the front panel.
Built for a different workflow, Horizon 16 and Horizon 32 are converters with no mic preamps aimed at those who get their analogue character from outboard gear.
The Horizon 16 offers 32 channels over four DB25 connectors for a total of 34-in/34-out, and the Horizon 32 doubles the channel count across eight DB25 connectors for a total of 50-in/50-out. Along with their ADAT connections, both have dedicated stereo monitor outputs and mix bus capture inputs, so console owners can record a stereo mix without using up any channels.
The Horizon range features no onboard DSP, instead relying on host processing and a Thunderbolt 3 architecture that’s said to achieve 0.99ms round-trip latency at 192kHz, a figure the company tells us was measured in real-world use.
“As Apple Silicon and modern host processing get more capable, the value proposition of the DSP walled-garden model continues to diminish,” Audient’s Chief Product Officer Andrew Allen said in a statement. “Engineers no longer need to lock themselves into proprietary plugin ecosystems to get pro-level performance.”
Up to four units can be daisy-chained on a single macOS driver, maxing out at 200×200 I/O with four Horizon 32s, and all three models offer dual ADAT expansion, BNC word clock, selectable reference levels and digital recall of input gain and system settings.
Audient’s control software has also been rebuilt from the ground up for the range, with a full routing matrix, four recallable cue mixes and custom monitoring profiles for speaker layouts up to 9.1.6.
The Horizon 8P and Horizon 16 are priced at £2,199/€2,499/$2,799, and the Horizon 32 at £2,799/€3,299/$3,499. All three are available to purchase from September 28th with a three-year warranty.
Find out more on Audient’s website.
