Don't have any experience with the Zen. Feature-wise it looks awesome. I've heard a fair amount of negative experiences with Antelope stuff in general (specifically their software/drivers), but that may be an unfair representation since you're less likely to hear from ppl with positive experience on the internet. If you get it I would just make sure you have the option to return/exchange it if it doesn't work out for you.
I've owned a few Apollo's (the silverface 8, the twin mk1 and an Apollo 16mk2). Generally have only good things to say. The drivers are really solid and the sound quality, especially on the mk2's, are excellent. The plugins sounds amazing and build quality is top notch. The apollo's do run on the hotter side, but no so much that I was worried. I was able to run multiple in a rack without any spaces between for long periods of time without any issues.
The negatives of the Apollo IMO:
- Routing in the mixer app is limited compared to others. This hasn't been a problem for me, but it's nowhere near as flexible as stuff from RME where you can route anything anywhere.
- Plugins are really expensive. They've recently put out some 'budget' version that sound equally as good but aren't officially licensed. You can usually get things at a reasonable price if you wait for sales/coupons. I bought all my interfaces during a promotion that gave me a bunch of free plugins or credit towards some so I personally have managed to avoid spending too much on plugins
- Their installers are HUGE and it installs every plugin on their platform, even if you don't own it. You can manually delete them, but you have to do this every time you update, which can be annoying. Especially since they starting adding third party stuff so there's quite a lot of plugins (most of which don't sound as good as UA's stuff IMO and can be acquired natively).
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