Arturia Audiofuse Studio - review (TL;DR: IT ROCKS!)

[Jay Vaughan]

So I got the Arturia Audiofuse Studio for my needs in building a ‘desktop studio’, and after a couple of days of playing with it I have to say the thing freakin’ rocks.  Like, seriously.  

Worked out of the box with my iPad and had zero issues with channels being detected/available - it just plain works.  AUM can use each channel independently, it tracks MIDI just fine, and its about as seamless an experience as you can imagine - just plugged it in and started using it with my iPad synth/DAW apps and so on. (Cubase on iPad is pretty cute, I have to admit.). Same with my Linux DAW - Reaper just sees it out of the box and I don’t need to do anything special to just start routing audio.  Its plug and play.  Plus, its fully weird to be able to stream directly to the mixer from an iDevice, over Bluetooth - this works surprisingly well to be honest, and means one less cable for the jams (since I love to include Endlesss in the sessions no matter what, nobody can take that from me any more, haha!).

I’ve got a fair few new-school synths plugged into it, such as the UNO Pro, MODAL Skulpt and Craft, the MicroFreak and Behringer Neutron, Blackbox as well as two Zynthians’ .. and one thing I have to say is that the Audiofuse preamps are *really* nice to overdrive into distortion ranges - adds a bit of punch to the synths that I haven’t heard elsewhere.  Its sort of like having multiple copies of a sweet distortion unit.  It doesn’t get in the way - audio quality is amazing, just really seriously good and NO discernible noise whatsoever - but if I add a bit of power at the synth stage its quite a hot signal at the Audiofuse, and this ‘distorts nicely’ - its not unpleasant.  I’ll try to use it on a track, its pretty subtle.

I’ve also had a bit of a play with the FX plugins that ship with it - already had the Analog Lab full version, which I consider to be quite a usable soft synth - but the FX are really out of this world.  I am inclined to A/B them with some of the offerings from UAD’s side of things - although those are DSP/hardware plugins, I have a feeling that Arturia was targeting them with their soft FX bundle.  It seems, to my ears at least, to be a very competitive alternative to the UAD/Luna side of things. - gonna compare with the UAD gear we have at Sky Studio some time.

Overall, a very satisfying experience - and the fact that its a breeze to add channels with ADAT is pretty exciting.  Honestly a very satisfying purchase that I can’t recommend highly enough to anyone on the music-bar looking to add a ‘desktop studio’ to their lives. 

j.
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Jay Vaughan
ibisum at gmail.com