Building on its range of high-end mastering solutions like Eclipse 384 professional audio gear manufacturer Antelope Audio introduced a true analogue monitoring and summing system at 137th AES, Los Angeles, booth 1019. Satori, a Japanese Buddhist term referring to enlightenment, is designed to deliver an 'epiphany' experience to the sound engineer. Antelope's relay-controlled stepped attenuator, the versatile connectivity options and great selection of stereo effects such as mid-side monitoring, make the Satori equally suited to both commercial and project studios.
"We wanted to design a clean and transparent monitoring controller that would not compromise the quality of our converters and will provide sound engineers with a genuine listening experience,” commented Igor Levin, founder and CEO of Antelope Audio. “Satori is a part of our concept for creating a coherent signal path all the way from the analogue source through conversion, recording and playback. Along with Satori, this philosophy is expressed in our latest product additions: MP32, Pure2, and Orion32.“
Four independent headphone outputs allow individual source selection and volume control, enabling separate feeds for musicians or vocalists. The headphone drivers on Satori employ the same audiophile-grade circuitry found in Antelope's line of premium home audio products, and are able to drive both low and high impedances.
Satori offers talkback and level trims, as well as stereo effects like mute, mono, dim and mid-side. The mid-side effect is rarely implemented in monitor controllers, yet routinely requested by mastering engineers. Gain offset is available for any input and output, making A/B testing easy and efficient. In addition to providing outstanding monitoring capabilities, Satori includes a fully analogue 8-channel summing mixer. This kind of analogue summing allows engineers who work completely “in-the-box” to mix signals in the analogue domain for a more natural blending of instruments.
With a generous amount of connectivity options, Satori fits in any studio featuring eight stereo inputs, four stereo outputs, a range of connectivity options including XLR, 1/4" TRS and D-Sub 25. In addition to four stereo speaker outputs, Satori features a dedicated subwoofer output. The unit also features D-Sub 25 connectivity, elegantly solving the issue of connecting to multi-channel converters.
Satori's delicately machined aluminum volume knob and large LED front panel push buttons allow easy access to the most commonly used monitoring functions such as input and monitor selectors, gain adjustment and level trimming. The unit also ships with the next generation of software application [Mac and PC] enabling flexible and accurate control. The software control panel allows fast and responsive source and speaker switching, accurate volume control, stereo effects selection, headphone controls and user-recallable presets. Analogue summing is fully controllable via the software application.
Satori is scheduled to ship later in Q4 of 2014.
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