Recording and Production in the News

New upgrade makes Orpheus even more flexible

Cambridge, UK, May 2008: Prism Sound, manufacturer of premium-quality interfaces and converters for the recording and broadcast markets, has announced an important upgrade to its multi-channel Orpheus Firewire computer interface.

Orpheus FireWire interface

The new upgrade, consisting simply of new firmware and new control software available from the Orpheus downloads page, enables Orpheus users to convert their audio inputs to ADAT outputs, and vice versa. This substantially improves the unit's stand-alone capabilities; for example users can now make use of Orpheus' exceptional conversion by connecting to their favourite DAW, including Pro Tools LE, using the ADAT interface.

Graham Boswell, Prism Sound's Sales and Marketing Director, says: "We have introduced this new feature because we recognise that our customers can, and do, use many different brands of converters in their own studio set-ups. Our response has been to develop an update that uses ADAT to address this issue in the most flexible way possible."

Orpheus units with the new upgrade incorporate an AV/C model that behaves as ADAT Send & Return, but also works when the Firewire cable is connected. This provides users operating in DAW mode with pure audio conversion.

Launched in 2007, Orpheus is a 1U, 19-inch rackmount 192kHz-capable unit that is designed to appeal to both recording professionals and serious project studio owners. With Orpheus, Prism Sound has succeeded in creating a computer-based Firewire interface that retails at an attractive price point without sacrificing many of the features and the quality of its top-of-the-range products, like the ADA-8XR.

Orpheus 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'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.