32 l April 2013
www.psneurope.com
studiofeature
“The real breakthrough is in iOS integration. Everything from the One, the Duet to the Quartet is iPad compatible”
Adam Colwill, Sonic Distribution
Merging Technologies is no exception: Horus is a mic-pre plus A-D/D-A box launched last year to great acclaim. “Horus is networked,” points out Chris Hollebone, sales operations & marketing manager at Merging Technologies, “so you can place the conversion
wherever you want within the project and it doesn’t have to be used with a Merging Technologies product – anything that has ASIO or CoreAudio drivers, in fact. It frees our conversion solutions from Pyramix, and the feedback we’re getting is very good, especially
from the classical recording fraternity. It has mic-pres as well, which is a little unusual, so the whole recording chain is extremely high quality.” Prism Sound now owns the SADiE platform, but for many years provided a de facto industry standard for music recording through the combination of its ADA8 converters and Pro Tools. For Graham Boswell, director of sales & marketing at the Prism Sound Group, the high end of recording – as well as mastering and broadcast – is still a Holy Grail worth pursuing. “It’s a passion, the way we do things,” he says, “and even though the range has been made a little more
ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK
“Word clock has become much more important to people, which is why it’s an option on the DS8000,” says XTA’s Waring Hayes. In fact, the migration of studio-level technology to the live arena represents a generational sea-change in attitudes towards handling the delicate techniques of A-D/D-A conversion, Hayes believes. “All
democractic perhaps, with Orpheus and Lyra, people who take their music seriously continue to invest in what we do.”
SPREADING THE WORD High-end converters are finding their way into wider, distributed audio systems – especially in the live arena. Where once they were the exclusive preserve of digital recording facilities, today’s professionals require the right kind of conversion everywhere. This month, a significant product launch at Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt reveals the analogue to digital option card for the DS8000 Audio Distribution System from XTA Electronics. With additional connectors on the rear panel, signal conversion now complements the splitting and distribution functionality that XTA is well known for – using a micro-controlled card to provide eight channels of 24-bit analogue to digital conversion with selectable sample rates up to 192kHz. “We’ve used AKM Semiconductor converters before, but this is a new 4-channel device,” confirms Waring Hayes, technical brand manager for XTA and MC2 “We have two of them in the box, feeding a 4 x 2-channel AES transmitter. One of the design briefs was for it to run at a higher sample rate, and comparisons showed that these chips worked just as well as the 2-channel version. The main reason for it is to create a more consistent digital signal path throughout, with adjustable sample rates but using fewer sample rate converters.” Flexible and far-seeing
operators, such as the UK’s Sonic Distribution, are witnessing this expansion in the converter market at first hand. Representing Apogee Electronics, Sonic is finding that rental companies figure among the fastest growth
the fancy stuff that people have
time to explore in the
studio is now filtering into live work,” he continues. “The newer, younger engineers are so au fait with the idea of computers being used all over a live system, they don’t think twice about it. Ten years ago the sight of a laptop on a console would have made people very nervous, let alone a master clock distribution system…”
Prism’s Graham Boswell
sectors for these high-end front ends, with high-profile artists adopting flagship offerings like the Symphony I/O on tour as a matter of course. “But the real breakthrough is in iOS integration,” says Adam Colwill, UK sales manager at Sonic Distribution. “Everything from the One, the Duet to the Quartet is iPad compatible. It’s the best-quality conversion available for the iPad. So many people are carrying their studios around in their backbacks, or doing a live show and getting really high-quality recordings straight onto the iPad. It’s great for engineers who are flying around the world: you don’t want to be laden with flightcases. “At first, people used the
conversion on the iPad itself – effectively just an adaptor. The latest iOS generation from Apogee uses the converter chips on board, Apogee-quality of course. Yes, so often the production ends up in some compressed file format but, in a way, that’s always been the case. If your music ends up on the radio it’s still one of many environments over which you have no control. That’s why it’s so crucial to get the best quality from the outset.”n
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