I bought one today from BAX and already knew the W10 drivers weren’t available, but shouldn’t be for much longer. It comes on Monday having paid less than £1900 for it which I thought was more than fair considering all that it is. I expect there will be a heavy demand for it once the drivers are available, current stocks may run out and the price might rise accordingly.
However I do have a MacBook Pro laptop with a copy of Cubase Elements 10 on it as well as the PC I run my Cubase 10 through so I should be able to familiarise myself with it in the meantime. To me anyway it just makes perfect sense to get all the sounds entering the software in the same digital format as the Cubase software operates in and, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s the only interface that can achieve this.
I have been using an Apollo x6 over the last year, and because the AXR4T spdif and adat i/o are 24 bit I’m hoping to use them both and see how that goes. One thing I’m going to do is connect each in turn to my laptop to compare the latency (especially input latency which can be disappointing on the Apollo) starting at my usual 96000 Hz sampling rate from within Cubase and also how recordings sound on playback etc. I’m hoping to be well impressed otherwise I might even have to return it.
If you like I could post another reply on this thread once I’ve done the above.
PS as I understand it the main difference between TB3 and TB2 in audio is the number of devices you can have in the chain, and that’s only if you’re using the much more expensive 40Gb/s TB3 leads. Perhaps there will be a future TB3 option card where Steinberg have come up with some way, akin to hyperthreading in CPUs, to spread the data traffic across the full 40GB/s bandwidth of TB3 even if only one device is connected, the maximum for TB2 being 20Gb/s. I concede the necessity for the Apple TB2<>TB3 adaptor is a pain in the ass though!