During the nearly four decades of its existence, the Apogee Electronics Corporation has been leading from the front. Apogee Electronic was set up in 1985 to offer a solution for a problem with digital technology that was not widely recognized, but that greatly improved the medium. At a stroke, Apogee’s name became synonymous with high quality digital audio.
Since then, Apogee has come up with many inventions that changed the worlds of music and technology. These include the world’s first standalone AD/DA converters, the first multi-channel 24-bit audio interface, the first high resolution digital audio interface for Pro Tools, the first standalone digital master clock, the first class-compliant Firewire drivers for Mac OS X, and the first digitally controlled Firewire audio interface for Mac and Logic.
There’s also a whole range of pioneering portable and professional audio interfaces for Mac, Logic, GarageBand, and MainStage, several groundbreaking studio-quality USB microphones, headphone amps, audio interfaces, the first all-in-one Thunderbolt audio interface, and more. All this has resulted in the company earning a string of TEC Awards.
Apogee’s unparalleled track record as a company that makes visionary and high-quality products is reflected in its mission statement, which says that the company aims to make “the best professional audio devices in the world,” and “to innovate and challenge old paradigms with new solutions that advance audio recording and elevate creativity.”
Clearly, innovation and the drive for top quality are at the heart of Apogee’s DNA. It is the core reason why the relatively small and independent company has had, and continues to have, such a huge impact, punching well above its weight.
In addition, Apogee has a number of values that are not directly related to its core business, but that nonetheless enhance its standing in the world. The company’s CEO, Betty Bennett, has said that Apogee is doing its best “to create a workplace that is conducive to creativity, productivity and environmental awareness.”
For this reason, Apogee, aims to be as environmentally sustainable as possible. Its headquarters are graced with152 solar panels, that can meet 60% of Apogee’s energy consumption. The company also does what it can to reduce its use of plastic, and is involved in various other eco-friendly efforts. It led to the company in 2017 receiving the City of Santa Monica’s Grand Prize Sustainable Quality Award.
The Apogee Electronics Corporation also donates to a number of nonprofit organizations, including Amnesty International, Plastic Pollution Coalition, Save The Children, Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF, Care and Conservation International.
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Unusually in a male-dominated industry, Apogee’s remarkable achievements have for more than two decades been spearheaded by a woman. In 2020, the company received the National Woman’s Business Enterprise Certification, in recognition of Betty Bennett, who is not only the company’s CEO, but also the owner.
Before co-founding Apogee, Bennett was president of Soundcraft USA. When the company was about to be sold to Harman, Bennett looked around for other opportunities. It came in the shape of serious issues that plagued the emerging digital audio platform.
Although there was a lot of hype in the early eighties about digital, with the claim that digital in general and CDs in particular sounded far superior to analogue, people who trusted their ears rather than the hype quickly noticed that CDs often sounded cold, harsh, brittle and metallic. In other words, not very good.
Bruce Jackson, one of the world’s most famous front of house engineers at the time, who had mixed concerts for Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen, had noticed the same thing. He recalled in a later interview:
“While on tour in Japan with Springsteen, I was given one of the very first CD players. I went out and bought some CDs and it was all very exciting – but when I listened to it through the PA that night it was just horrible; my cassette sounded way better. It turned out that the Japanese had developed these textbook filters with extremely steep roll-offs, resulting in the phase being twisted around a couple of times at high frequency – it was way, way out.”
Jackson and Bennett, together with Soundcraft engineer Christof Heidelberg, all were acutely aware of the problem, and reflected on how to solve it. They came up with an anti-alias filter for the digital converters in multitracks tape machines that had a much gentler roll-off, linear phase, and other characteristics, that all greatly improved the sound.
Bennett, Jackson and Heidelberger took the serendipitous decision to manufacture and market their new filter. They set up Apogee Electronics for this purpose in December in 1985. Starting out in a garage, they came up with two filters, the 924 and the 944, which had to be retrofitted in very expensive Sony and Mitsubishi multitrack tape recorders.
The brand new company first demonstrated their filters at the Los Angeles AES show of 1986. Jackson had fitted filters to a few channels of a Sony 3324 digital 24-track tape recorder, and with the help of an oscilloscope he demonstrated the dramatic difference between the undistorted sound waves that had gone through the Apogee filters, and the heavy distortion of the other waves.
However, convincing people to part with serious money, $5445 for a full retrofit with filters of a Sony 3324 tape machine, which cost €130,000 at the time, was not easy.
Engineers and producers were quickly convinced of the benefits of the filters. However, Bennett realized that the company had to persuade artists of the enormous improvement in sonic quality that the filters brought before the budgets were freed to purchase them. After that, the filters started selling like the proverbial hotcakes.
Building on the success of the filters, Apogee went on to make it possible to fit them in a far wider range of machines, while Mitsubishi and Otari opted the install them in their factories as standard.
Apogee in the end sold an amazing 30.000 of their 924 and 944 filters, thereby arguably rescuing the nascent world of digital audio, and certainly greatly improving the sound of many recordings made at the time.
However, soldering filters into hyper-expensive machines was expensive, cumbersome and carried risks, so Apogee’s next step was to create standalone AD and DA converters. In 1991, it brought the AD500 and the DA1000 on the market, and because the concept was so new, Apogee again had to explain to potential customers what these brand-new boxes did, and why it was a good idea to acquire one.
Bennet said in an interview in 2005 “We’ve always used education to try to help people understand what we were doing. Better filters, converters, digital (UV22) and low-jitter clocks will make digital gear sound better, but we had to help people understand the benefits of replacing their converters. Otherwise, why would someone buy something that they already had built into their existing equipment?”
UV22 is the name of the dithering algorithm that Apogee had developed, that maximized dynamic range, and was also designed to minimize digital artefacts at low volumes, like in reverb tails and so on. It worked by introducing sonic energy around 22kHz, which smoothed out the sound, in a way that’s similar to high frequency bias in analogue tape.
UV22 was one of the many innovations that Apogee came up with in order to improve digital audio equipment. It was at the heart of its UV-1000 mastering processor, which found its way into many mastering facilities in the mid-nineties.
Yet another major leap forwards came in 1997, at a time when Bennett had taken sole ownership of the company. The revolutionary piece of gear that the company came up with this time was the Apogee AD-8000, which was an 8-channel, 24-bit AD converter, that worked extremely well as a front end to Pro Tools. To be able to connect the AD-8000 directly to Pro Tools, Apogee also came up with the AmBus HD Card.
The interface of the AD8000 was designed by Bob Clearmountain, at the time already famous as a producer and engineer, and most of all as the man who had pioneered the modern concept of mixing as a standalone activity, paving the way for the star mixers of today. In the early 80s, Clearmountain was the first mixer to receive royalties for his work.
Clearmountain had become involved as a consultant to Apogee, and would also go on to marry Bennett. From the late nineties onwards, Clearmountain’s high-level expert input helped shape many of the products that Apogee developed.
In the new century, innovative Apogee products continued to be released at an impressive pace. In 2000 there was the Trak 2, which was the first unit to combine a high-resolution converter with a microphone pre-amp, and which was again designed to work with Pro Tools.
In 2002, the Apogee Big Ben Master Clock saw the light, using the company’s pioneering C777 clock-regeneration technology. Apogee’s AD-16X and DA-16X converters also used C777 technology. A Sound On Sound review of the Big Ben concluded…
“We have come to expect nothing less than excellence in clocking and jitter handling from Apogee, and the Big Ben is no disappointment. As a master clock it excels in every way, but the unique additional functionality of audio signal distribution and format conversion will prove very beneficial to many.”
Apogee continued to come up with innovative and novel products that pushed boundaries. The amount of products and the consistently high quality of them is all the more remarkable, given the relatively small size of the company, with currently about 40 employees.
Apogee’s web site lists an impressive 57 obsolete products, 5 legacy products, 6 end of life products, and 11 current hardware products, plus a range of plugins. This adds up to 79 hardware products in total that Apogee has released over the 38 years of its existence. It would go too far to mention them all, so we’ll conclude with a shortlist of the most cutting edge and influential products of the last 20 years…
In 2003, Apogee came up with the Mini-Me and Mini-DAC, which were small, portable Firewire drivers designed for use with Mac OS-X. In 2006, there was the Ensemble, the first digitally controlled audio interface, followed in 2007 by the Duet, which was the first portable professional FireWire audio interface. All the products mentioned so far, with the exception of the AmBus Card, received Tech Awards.
Apogee continued to explore the dual track of professional studio products and portable products more aimed at home studio market. In the latter category there were, in 2009, the GIO, a guitar interface and foot pedal controller for GarageBand, Logic and MainStage, and the ONE, the first combined USB microphone and audio interface for Mac. The professional market was served in 2010 with a product that has since become the benchmark for professional audio interfaces, the Symphony I/O.
The same year also saw the JAM, which was the first studio-quality input for the iPhone, iPad and Mac, and received a Macworld Eddy Award. A year later there was the MiC, the first studio quality USB microphone for Mac OS and iOS based devices.
A series of professional audio interfaces called the One, Duet, and Quartet were brought on the market in 2013, and 2014 saw the Ensemble Thunderbolt, the first all-in-one audio interface, with an amazing 1.1ms latency.
The Apogee Groove USB DAC and headphone amp, released in 2015, is aimed at pros and the consumer market and is a high quality listening device. Apogee also worked with Apple to create a Direct button in Logic that enables zero latency. Ultra-low latency is also at the heart of Apogee’s DualPath Monitoring plugin, released in 2018.
Most recently the company came up with the HypeMiC, which is the first USB mic with built-in analogue compressor; the Symphony Desktop, the first audio interface with touch screen control; the Apogee Boom USB audio interface; two lavalier mics and a set of in-ear headphones with 3D recording, made with Sennheiser.
In addition to all the above, Apogee has released a range of effects plugins, that include their emulations of the Pultec EQP-1A and MEQ-5, emulations of several of Bob Clearmountain’s effects signal chains, and much more.
In the eighties, Apogee arguably rescued digital from an early death, or at least made sure that a lot of music recorded with early digital still sounds good today. The company has consistently operated at the cutting edge of the digital revolution ever since, with a reputation for top-quality sound, thinking out of the box in terms of functionality, and thereby heralding the next generation of digital devices.
Apogee’s stellar reputation remains undiminished in 2023, and the industry’s eyes continue to rest on the company to see what it will do next, and with that, to get a glimpse of the future.
