Antelope Orion 32+ Gen4 (my experience with it...)

I may be being unobservant but I’m unclear what you mean by missing features and statuses?

I saw you mentioned the clock dropping… I don’t have the same unit: but this is maybe the best clock I’ve worked with in years. Very solid and my opto/Adat gear clocks beautiful. Very solid.

Let me see if the software is the same. Happy to trouble shoot.

My thing about the software is that.. it might have too many features! Happy to help here. I hear you’re up and running.. maybe I have an unreasonable standard but being uncomfortable with your gear is risky!

I can honestly say I love my interface- but it was the worst onboarding experience and I worked on massive digital broadcast consoles in the early 00s so I know pain!!

the clock is not actually dropping sync.  The front control panel shows it is locked.  Support replied and seem to agree with me that the control panel has a bug.  Antelope documentation is always lacking in detail and for the Orion 32+ Gen4, it makes no mention of this, but I found this article that touches on it...


support.antelopeaudio.com/en/support/solutions/articles/42000096748-what-i-need-to-know-about-clocking-to-set-up-my-devices-

and it says this "When you're using your device through USB, the "USB" option has to be selected. The internal Clock of the device will still be the Clock Source for the device, however it will be instructed by the Computer/Mac as to which Sample Rate you need to have selected".

So what I think I'm seeing is that when Pro Tools (or any media/audio app) takes control of the interface, the clock source switches to "usb" which means the same thing as using "internal" clock, except that USB (or the app) is dictating the sample rate.  BUT... the control panel seems to not have a state for "usb", so it just shows blank.  The support guys seems to agree and has asked me to try an older version of control panel, and frankly I'm not excited about that.  Sure, let's try an older version and potentially run into new/old bugs that we already fixed...  no thank you.  But I will probably try it temporarily (just to see if the older version has that state available) then switch back.  and only if I find the time to be their beta test team (again, no thank you).  But let's face it, I got that kind of crap from UA too.  Whatever happened to a support team that could actually put their hands on a product to verify it themselves? 

Did you try a different USB port? Otherwise try uninstalling the usb controller in device manager and reboot. Windows should automatically reinstall the latest driver...

I’ve read so many stories of bugs, driver problems and support issues with Antelope stuff over the years. Personally I’d steer clear. If I had to make it work I’d probably set it up with an RME Digiface USB so that you can use their drivers instead (although you will be losing out on some features like direct monitoring etc.).

USB 2 devices can often work poorly or not at all when plugged into USB 3.0 ports in my experience
I keep the Orion STudio plugged into a usb 2 port on the motherboard with no hub in between and it runs stable that way

just for kicks (and to make sure it's still getting the USB bandwidth through the new setup) I setup a session at 192Khz, 32-float and recorded 32 tracks (of silence but the DAW doesn't care either way).  Then I added 32 instances of the Maag EQ4 UAD-2 which just about maxed out my quad PCIe card, and I added 32 instances of the PA Maag 4 native EQ.  It all played back fine (about 20% overall cpu usage).  Then I recorded several short sections, scrambled the order and used "snap to previous" to make them all back to back (to simulate a little randomness) and that worked fine too.  So I believe it is working as it should.

Mainly because I don't want to use a Mac.  As I think I posted in this thread (or maybe others) I've got MANY years of experience using a PC and I know how to troubleshoot problems if/when they come up.  I don't know much about Macs (ok, had one way back when they only had one mouse button but it was really my wife's...).  And looking at desktop PCs, there are not many of them that even offer TB, and if they do the drivers for TB have not been terribly stable either.  I also don't really care so much about RTL because I'll mostly be monitoring in real time through the Antelope "mixer" (like I did previously with the UA Apollo console).  I'm used to that workflow. 

edit:  I should also mention that I'm not willing to pay "Mac" prices.  I got my new XPS for under $600 (I know some people - but I know some Apple people too), then put in a few extra drives, but still probably under $750.  Any Mac I see is well over $2000 (and up to $7K or more) for anything equivalent.  

Yeah, if I had Thunderbolt on my system I probably would have just stuck with the Apollo 16 (and installed the TB card into it).

just checking in here... too late to return it so it's mine.  I was able to sell the MRC (the remote control) since that seems geared toward immersive audio and I have no intention of doing that any time soon.  Found a local buyer that had an Orion 32+ Gen4 too, but not the MRC, and wanted to do immersive... so it was a good match (even though Antelope made it somewhat difficult for him to register it - but it worked out).  That lowered my overall cost of getting this interface.  Still working on selling my old Apollo 16 (but have not been trying too hard).  I'll be selling the PC I used with it too and the combo would make a great system for someone that wants to be able to record 16 simultaneous tracks and has a console or a bunch of outboard pres (like I do).   I am currently enjoying having the ability to now do > 16 tracks myself though.  

Soundwise, I've done numerous sessions and gotten no complaints.  It sounds as good as the Apollo for sure.  I'm getting used to the differences in it's routing, virtual mixer, etc. vs the UA Console.  The only thing I'm really using the mixer for is for latency-free monitoring and putting a little reverb into headphones for singers.  It works fine for that.   I still have the UAD Quad PCIe card so my DSP plugins still work along with the native equivalents.  The new PC is significantly faster (11th gen i5 to 14th gen i5) and I've noticed that besides running plugins with no issues, bouncing is faster and zipping up files for uploading to clients is faster too.  So I'm happy with the progress.  Why do I get i5 instead of i7 or i9?  For me it's a cost to performance tradeoff as well as heat (i5 is lower wattage and less likely to make the fans rev up to cool it) and still gets really good performance.

Next step is to see if a newer mesh wifi 6E system will have a little better "reach" to my studio (it's ~ 90 ft from the house) and it's a pain sometimes to download updates because signal is low and slow.  Another solution may be to put a weatherproof unit outside of my studio, but every hop also slows things down (but still might be better than it is now).    

What sort of RTL over thunderbolt are we talking about here?