Arturia announced the AudioFuse Studio Rev2 on 11 September 2026, an updated version of its 18-in/20-out desktop interface. Priced at €989 / £849 / $1,199, it is squarely a professional-studio purchase and, on the face of it, has nothing to do with MPE.

Stay with it, because the connectivity section of this interface addresses a problem that expressive players complain about constantly and that almost nobody writes about: getting several MPE controllers into one system without a pile of adapters and a reboot every time something is unplugged.

What's Actually New

The headline audio specs are a tidy refresh rather than a reinvention: 24-bit converters running up to 192 kHz, preamps with extended gain range and more headroom (-129 dBu EIN, 119 dB dynamic range), and a move to USB-C.

The I/O count is generous. Four preamps, four additional line inputs (two with RIAA phono preamps), four line outputs, four analogue insert points, two re-amping outputs, and two headphone outputs. ADAT I/O adds up to eight more channels at 96 kHz, with coaxial S/PDIF and Word Clock alongside.

Then the part that matters here: MIDI In/Out, and a three-port USB hub with MIDI support. The first port supplies 120 mA, the other two supply a full 1 A each.

There is also a Bluetooth module supporting AAC, aptX, aptX HD and aptX Low Latency, and the unit ships with Arturia's AudioFuse Create Suite of effects and instruments. Full specifications are on the AudioFuse Studio product page.

The MPE Connectivity Problem

Anyone running more than one expressive controller knows the shape of this. A Roli Seaboard draws power over USB. A LinnStrument draws power over USB. An Osmose is a hungry device with its own supply. Add a Haken Continuum or a Sensel Morph and you are managing a small power budget across a laptop's two or three ports.

Unpowered hubs fail here in ways that are hard to diagnose. Controllers enumerate intermittently, or they enumerate and then drop mid-session when a second device draws current. The symptom looks like an MPE problem — stuck notes, missing channels — and is actually a power problem.

Two 1 A ports and a 120 mA port on a hub that is part of the interface, not a separate box on the floor, removes a genuine category of failure. That is unglamorous and it is worth real money to anyone who has lost a take to it.

The MIDI host support on the hub is the second half. It means USB-MIDI class-compliant devices can be routed without necessarily going through the computer for every connection — useful when your expressive controller needs to reach a hardware synth directly.

And the five-pin MIDI In/Out still matters more than people assume. Plenty of MPE-capable hardware speaks DIN MIDI, and MPE runs perfectly well over it — the standard is channel allocation, not a transport. The bandwidth ceiling of DIN MIDI is a real constraint with dense per-note data across many voices, but for most rigs it is not the bottleneck people fear.

What It Doesn't Do

To be clear about limits: this is an audio interface, not an MPE product. There is no per-note routing matrix, no channel-zone management, no MPE-aware merging of multiple controllers. If you need to combine two MPE controllers into one channel-zone-correct stream, you still need software or a dedicated MIDI processor.

It also does not solve DIN MIDI's throughput ceiling. If you are driving a ten-voice expressive rig with high-resolution pressure and slide over five-pin cable, you will find the wall.

And at $1,199, nobody buys this to solve a USB power problem. You buy it for the preamps and the I/O count, and the connectivity is a bonus that happens to matter more to expressive players than to most.

Who Should Look

If you are a composer or sound designer running a hybrid rig — two or three expressive controllers, hardware synths, outboard, monitor switching — the Rev2 consolidates a lot of boxes. The insert points and re-amping outputs suggest Arturia is aiming at people who record hardware seriously, which describes a good portion of the MPE community.

If you play one controller into a laptop and record in the box, a cheaper interface does the same job. Spend the difference on instruments.

The AudioFuse Studio Rev2 is available now through Arturia and dealers including Sweetwater.