Audient Horizon 32 — a flagship Thunderbolt 3 audio interface

Following the release of the 16, Audient has expanded its Horizon studio interface range with a 50-input, 50-output model. The new interface is designed for large commercial studios, broadcast facilities and extensive multichannel setups handling dense audio projects.

Photo: official website audient

The interface uses a 1U rack enclosure with passive, fanless cooling. The main change from the smaller models is twice the analogue connectivity. Eight rear-panel DB25 connectors provide simultaneous access to 32 line inputs and 32 line outputs for mixing consoles or racks of external analogue processing. Like the Horizon 16, it has no front-panel audio connections. The rear panel also provides a dedicated Stereo Mix-Bus for direct recording of the final summed mix, independent TRS monitor outputs, 16 channels of ADAT I/O expansion and BNC Word Clock connections.

Photo: official website audient

The device allows precise manual calibration of the reference level to analogue equipment standards of +18 dBu and +24 dBu. Dynamic range reaches 133 dB. The high-speed Thunderbolt 3 bus allows up to four Horizon interfaces to be daisy-chained. This expands the studio system to 200 × 200 inputs and outputs under a single macOS driver.

Photo: official website audient

Horizon Control software operates the device, routing and extensive monitoring section, including mono, polarity inversion and Dim functions. Round-trip latency when recording through native plugins is 0.99 ms at 32-bit/192 kHz. The circuitry uses ESS ES9823PRO and ES9039 converters, ultra-low-noise OPA1602/OPA1612 operational amplifiers and hybrid PLL circuits for hardware jitter suppression.

Photo: official website audient

Audient Horizon 32 is available for $4,300.