Digital Audio Denmark Introduces AX Center ThunderCore Audio Interface

DAD just announced a new Thunderbolt 3 audio interface for studios, location recording setups or touring rigs. The new AX Center is a dedicated Thunderbolt modular audio interface with dual microphone and instrument inputs, dual headphones and monitors outputs, built-in PRO|MON monitor control with speaker EQ, and two slots for DAD expansion cards. It comes with 256 channels via Thunderbolt, 256 Dante I/O channels, up to 192 MADI I/O channels and 16 ADAT channels, as well as onboard summing and processing.
  DAD - Digital Audio Denmark - one of the world's leading manufacturers of high-quality analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog professional converters, is a wholly-owned business unit and brand of NTP Technology, a company mainly focused on digital routing solutions for broadcast applications. NTP Technology acquired DAD in 2008 and the brand has grown to be recognized in the recording and studio market, where it also supplies audio interfaces to other renowned companies. For its own solutions, DAD unfortunately maintains the terrible tradition of making its front panels golden - a visual stain on any equipment rack. It might be accepted in Denmark, but fortunately users can always ask DAD to supply a non-reflective black alternative panel to avoid eyesore.

The new DAD AX Center 1U modular 19" interface is no exception, and it will shine its nasty golden glow as a center piece in studios, making it hard to believe that it is effectively a compact yet powerful solution that just deserved a better product design. Apparently the DAD team thinks this will be fine.

"AX Center was born to sit in a rack right next to you in the studio – maybe even on your desktop – or in your portable recording rig. Basically, it unites the distinguished audio quality of our AD & DA conversion with the transparency and musicality of our mic preamps and our flexible digital audio I/O infrastructure," says Mikael Vest, Sales Director, DAD. "I’m truly excited that we have united all of the sonic qualities and the versatile interface technologies that we have been developing and refining over the past decades in a compact unit that – while expandable – is extremely powerful and great-sounding right out of the box."

"The sheer audio quality of our AD/DA converters and transparency of our preamps origin form back in the days of high-res DXD audio recording for SACD that made the audio file community embrace us years ago. And in parallel, the complex audio infrastructure facilities in post production and broadcast saw the benefits of our flexible audio-routing and digital format conversion. Now, with AX Center we take the best from both worlds, offering a compact 1RU interface with built-in DAD AD/DA conversion and mic preamps, as well as flexible DADman routing, monitor control, DSP-processing and the option to add even more I/O flexibility via two expansion slots.
 
"At the end of the day, it's all about capturing the source truthfully and get it into whatever DAW you may be using exactly as it is, and the high-res and near-zero latency technology of our ThunderCore implementation provides just that. We see a demand for this in many production environments, in the studio or on the road,” Mikael Vest adds.

The AX Center interface was designed to be the central point for monitor control due to the PRO|MON section of the complimentary DADman control software, which gives access to a 512x64 channel summing processor. A second core feature is the built-in SPQ processing that offers 128 channels with a total of 1024 EQ filters, as well as delay, making it an ideal solution for accurate speaker correction in the studio.    
 
In the best NTP tradition, the internal routing matrix of the DADman software spans 984x984 channels, allowing any input to be routed to any output, or even duplicating and routing to several different destinations simultaneously.

Finally, the ThunderCore connection has a hardware latency of only 9 samples, 32-bit floating point resolution, and is capable of handling up to 256 bidirectional channels at 48 and 96kHz, 128 at 192kHz, and 64 channels at 384kHz. It also supports Apple Silicon processors, macOS Big Sur and forward with a Core Audio driver, as well as Windows 10 and forward with an ASIO ThunderCore driver. 

The manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) is $3,999 USD and DAD predicts delivery will start in Q4 2023. So, plenty of time to ask the company to please find a designer that is not color blind and do a better job with the front panels. The gold thing with the glowing blue LED logo will be on demo and display at the 2023 NAB Show in Las Vegas 16-19 April at booth C3022.
www.ntp.dk
www.digitalaudio.dk