JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com and with Dave Casey of Apogee, and we're talking about duet. Give us a little background and tell us about the product.

DAVE CASEY: Sure. Well, Duet is a brand new product that we're very excited about. It's a two-input, two-output audio interface for the Mac platform. It has two preamps and the ability to control headphones and monitors on the output. It has some direct integration features directly into Logic that make it very convenient when you're working in a Logic session. There's a specific control panel that opens up within Logic that allows you to make changes to the unit from within Logic and save it as actually part of the Logic session.

The thing that we're really excited about is we've made a very portable, very convenient small piece that still sounds like an Apogee. There is a certain sound quality that people expect from our products and we've managed to balance portability and the small size with the Apogee sound.

JOE WALLACE: Now, do you like this for live recording? DJ systems? All the above? Tell me who this is best for and what it can be used for to push the boundaries a little bit.

DAVE CASEY: Sure. I would have to say definitely all of the above. DJ, live recording, home studio enthusiast. Basically, anybody looking to get really, really good sound quality into whatever they're recording with is going to benefit from this. The beauty of the piece is is that you're able to record tracks that aren't necessarily considered scratch or temporary tracks. You can actually record final product tracks, which is exciting to a lot of people because they want to have a portable option: to be able to go to a friend's house or to the beach or to the mountains and record an actual keeper performance instead of just a scratch track. So, really, anybody can benefit from it.

JOE WALLACE: Now, the box is small, so what did you have to fit into Duet to make it able to record keeper tracks?

DAVE CASEY: Well, that's a lot of design magic. There's some engineering stuff that's going on in there that we've just -- we've managed to optimize the space and the form factor. The components are actually directly out of our ensemble pice, which is a larger interface, but we've managed to get two channels directly from that and right into the smaller chassis and managed to bus power it as well.

JOE WALLACE: Now you mentioned the special interface that opens up in Logic.

DAVE CASEY: Yes.

JOE WALLACE: Can you show us the interface?

DAVE CASEY: I sure can. Yeah. So, when you're working in Logic 8, you go to Options>Audio and open Apogee Control Panel. They actually implemented this specific control panel for duet. So, when you go into the control panel, all of the control for the interface is actually right here within software, so you can go in and make changes to what type of input you're accessing, and the beauty of it is that you've got bidirectional communication between the controller and the actual slider within the application itself. So, everything within the control of the Duet is available in this control panel. The beauty of it is if you're working with a vocalist on Monday, do some other work, come back on Friday, you launch your session, all of your settings for duet all come back because that saved as part of the session.

JOE WALLACE: What audio resolution is supported by Duet?

DAVE CASEY: It's able to function at up to 96 kHz, 24-bit/96 kHz.

JOE WALLACE: Well thanks very much. We've been talking with Dave Casey of Apogee. I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com.