- [Jeff] So, I finally broke down
and purchased this guy right here.
And let me tell you,
it has changed my desktop setup.
I know I just showed you my desktop setup
and everything involved with that,
including the MixPre-3,
and a lot of you guys were wondering like,
"What happened to the Universal Audio kit?"
Well, it's back now.
And I owe that partially to the OWC Thunderbolt Hub.
Stick around, I'll explain.
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So this is the $179 OWC Thunderbolt Hub,
and there are other hubs available like this,
but basically, the premise is
you can use it to turn a single Thunderbolt port
into three Thunderbolt ports.
Now, obviously, the amount of bandwidth available
doesn't change
but it gives you access
to more physical Thunderbolt 3 ports,
which is great,
because oftentimes, the Thunderbolt devices that we're using
don't come close to really saturating
the Thunderbolt bandwidth,
and that's mostly going to be the case with my situation.
So here is the OWC Thunderbolt Hub.
You can see it next to my iPhone 13 mini
so it's super small and compact.
On the top, you get a nice shiny surface
that is a fingerprint magnet, of course,
and dust magnet,
but here is the uplink port
for the Thunderbolt connectivity to your computer,
and you get an extra USB Type-A port,
10 gigabits per second.
All right, so let's talk about
the real star of the show here
and this is it.
So before we get to the Thunderbolt ports though,
you have the DC input,
so, of course, this is not bus-powered,
you will need an external power supply,
you get a Kensington lock,
and here are the three Thunderbolt ports
and the little holes above are for a cable stabilizers
which are sold separately.
On the bottom, you get four little feet
to keep it stable on the desk,
and OWC includes a Thunderbolt cable inside the box,
which is always a nice thing,
and the power adapter, of course.
So you just plug in the barrel style connector
into the dock itself.
You'll notice, it illuminates the logo on top,
which would normally be super annoying,
but OWC has actually made it possible
to toggle this illumination off
using this little input right there at the top
so you just click in there like that
and you can adjust either to a lesser brightness
or turn it off all together, which is nice.
I wish more companies would have that feature.
But the only downside is that when you power it off
and you plug it back in,
yeah, it turns back on.
So here's a behind the scenes look at my desktop setup,
and I know, the cable management could be a little better,
but it's actually fairly tidy.
Some of the wires have to, sort of,
have some slack in them,
especially for the display with the monitor arm
'cause I can adjust it up and down,
left and right, et cetera.
But when the desk is placed in the proper position,
you really don't see any of these cables,
they're well hidden,
but, of course, I can always still work on that.
So you can see the OWC hub
mounted on the back part of my desk
and right now,
I have it connected to my 16-inch MacBook Pro.
So here it is,
affixed to my desk and hidden away,
thanks to a piece of velcro,
which is super handy, right?
So here I have the uplink cable
that comes from the MacBook Pro
and also have three additional Thunderbolt 3 ports
so basically, one port to three ports
so I have my external SSD,
I have the Universal Audio Apollo,
and then I have the Pro Display XDR.
All three of those devices connected via a single cable,
thanks to this hub.
So here's the SSD
mounted to the back of the desk as well,
nice and hidden away,
here's the Universal Audio Apollo Twin X,
and here is the Pro Display XDR.
So all three of those devices connected through the hub
going to my MacBook Pro,
and on the Pro Display XDR itself,
I'm using the USB ports to connect additional devices.
So when connected to a host,
the light on the hub turns blue,
you can still go in and disable that though.
I really appreciate the gesture,
but I do wish there was just a toggle switch,
it would make it a lot simpler.
So here's the Apollo Twin X,
again, I'm so happy to be using a Universal Audio interface.
I just love these devices.
Here's my webcam,
again, connected to the Pro Display XDR,
and here is the CFexpress reader,
again, magnetized.
I showed you that in our "Back to the Mac" video.
So the cool thing
is that I can easily connect to the Mac mini,
which definitely benefits from this hub,
because there are only two physical Thunderbolt ports
on this device,
and my Mac mini is my main machine for my desktop,
so that's really the inspiration behind this whole thing
because previously,
I didn't have enough Thunderbolt 3 ports.
That's the reason why I was using the MixPre-3
instead of this guy right here.
Now, I recently did a hands-on with the Keychron Q2,
and the cool thing about it
is it includes a programmable control knob
and look what I did,
I programmed it
to control the Universal Audio monitor output.
And I just thought that was super cool.
I wanted to share it.
And if you click the knob, guess what happens?
Yeah, it mutes it.
How awesome is that?
So if you haven't watched the Keychron Q2 video,
be sure to do so,
because this keyboard has a lot of bells and whistles,
that's one of my favorite.
Now, back to our scheduled program.
You may be wondering,
"Jeff, do you get full resolution with the Pro Display XDR
when going through the Thunderbolt Hub?"
And the answer to that question is, yes,
full 6K resolution at 60 hertz
so that's no problem at all.
But what about charging?
Well, that's sort of the downside,
only 60 watts power delivery to the MacBook Pro.
Obviously, that's not gonna be a big deal
when connected to the Mac mini
but just keep that in mind,
not gonna charge at full speed
for some of Apple's more power hungry laptops.
And the USB hub on the Pro Display XDR itself,
you can see that here,
so the keyboard's connected at USB 2.0 speeds, of course,
and then you have the USB 3 speeds
which five gigabits per second for the CFexpress reader
and your Logi 4K Pro webcam.
Now, if I switch over to Thunderbolt connectivity,
you can see, I have all three Thunderbolt devices listed,
the Apollo Twin X,
the Envoy Pro SSD,
and, of course, the Pro Display XDR.
Now, let's talk about SSD speed.
So here is the Envoy Pro SSD
when going through the hub
and you can see the read and write speeds,
not shabby at all,
doesn't reach what the drive is fully capable of
but again, plenty of bandwidth here
for my particular use case.
Now, here it is, connected to the dock
but with no other devices connected,
you'll see similar performance there
with right and read speeds.
A lot will depend
on the type of device you connect
and how much bandwidth it uses.
At any rate, you can connect
up to five Thunderbolt devices to this hub,
meaning you can daisy chain additional devices.
Now, here is how the drive performs
when directly connected to my MacBook Pro
and you'll notice, yes, indeed,
the performance is better
than when going through the hub.
And that's totally expected.
The cool thing is that each different port on this hub
is its own separate branch
so when you disconnect one device,
it's not going to interfere with another device
as in the case with the daisy chain,
and the device plays nice with bus-powered SSDs as well
with each port providing up to 15 watts of power.
So, this thing has truly been a game changer
for my desktop setup.
I'm so happy to be back on the Universal Audio platform.
I'm a huge fan of Universal Audio products.
Just that the workflow, the sound quality,
I just makes me happy to be able to record on there
and I don't think I realized what I was missing
and I don't know why I waited so long
to make this happen.
So ladies and gentlemen,
let me know what you guys think
down below in the comment section.
Like I said, if you haven't seen
our new "Back to the Mac" episode
where I break down my desktop set up,
obviously, some things have changed with this video,
but if you haven't seen that,
be sure to watch that here
and you can also catch our review
of the Keychron Q2 as well.
So, I'm interested to hear what you have to say
about my setup.
Do you have some feedback, suggestions, questions,
let me know down below in the comment section.
I'll be hanging down there all day
so I'll be sure to reply to whatever you guys have to say.
This is Jeff with 9to5Mac.
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