Recording and Production in the News

Orpheus is shipping

Cambridge, UK, January 2008: Prism Sound, the respected manufacturer of premium-quality interfaces and converters for the recording and broadcast markets, have begun shipping their new multi-channel Orpheus Firewire computer interface to dealers and distributors worldwide. The first international pre-orders - to a variety of locations including France, Italy, the Ukraine and various locations in the USA and Canada - have already been fulfilled.

Orpheus FireWire interface

"It's a pleasure to be shipping the first Orpheus units - the final stage in a long development process," comments Graham Boswell, Sales & Marketing Director of Prism Sound. "Orpheus is the end result of several years of intensive R&D. Our starting point was that we wanted to be able to make a computer-based Firewire interface at a price point that would be attractive to serious project studio owners and professionals, but without sacrificing many of the features and the quality of our top-of-the-range products, like the ADA-8XR. Of course, that's quite a tall order, so it's taken a while. But hand on heart, we think Orpheus is as good as it can possibly be, and that the wait was worth it."

First unveiled at 2007's Frankfurt Musikmesse, Orpheus is named after the mythological Greek musician whose prowess on the lyre created music so beautiful it charmed wild animals. A 1U, 19-inch rackmount device, the 192kHz-capable unit offers eight simultaneous balanced analogue inputs, four line-level jack ins and four auto-sensing mic/line Neutrik combi jacks that will accept either jack or XLR connectors. The high-quality mic preamps allow the signal at the mic-level inputs to be boosted by up to 60dB (in 1dB increments), and each analogue input has its own auto-aligning Prism Sound Overkiller built in, to prevent signal overloads before the A-D conversion stage. There are also a switchable SPDIF/AES-EBU stereo digital input and an eight-channel ADAT optical input, allowing the Orpheus to handle a maximum possible total of 18 simultaneous inputs to any computer-based recording system hooked up to the unit's main Firewire connector. A built-in mixer is included, driving eight analogue outputs, allowing users to monitor input signals with zero latency, insert analogue summing mixers, or control multiple stereo or multi-channel monitoring systems directly from Orpheus. One of Prism Sound's respected high-quality, low-jitter digital clock sources is also built in, along with synchronous sample-rate conversion and SNS noise-shaping, permitting accurate real-time reclocking or sample-rate conversion, or high-quality dithering of 24-bit material down to 16-bit for CD mastering.

Orpheus is fully software-controllable via a cross-platform control application (available for PCs running Windows XP or Macs running OS X), and is therefore ideally suited to the computer-based musician who wants to work with the flexibility offered by modern computer-based DAWs but wishes to maintain the quality of signals from analogue recording sources or processors in his digital production environment.