Producer and mix engineer David Oversby-Powell has invested in a Prism Sound Titan multichannel audio interface, which he has been using to record parts of Ellie Goulding’s backing track for her current live tour.
“My studio in Hackney is based around a Pro Tools HD Native set up and while I do a lot of work ‘in the box’, I like to go ‘out of the box’ into my analog compressors and tape delays,” Oversby-Powell explains. “With this approach it is absolutely essential to have a high quality audio interface in order to maintain the quality of the signal.”
For the last four years this task was fulfilled by a Prism Sound Orpheus interface, but when the company announced the launch of a MDIO-HDX expansion module for its Titan and Atlas products, Oversby-Powell decided it was time for a change.
“The MDIO-HDX Pro Tools module will allow me to connect my Titan directly to Pro Tools without having to use ADAT between the two. I will literally be able to plug it in and it will be ready to go. The roundtrip delay is automatically compensated for and there is no need to manually set it up because all of the Titan’s key controls will be available within the Pro Tools GUI. By dispensing with the need for separate software or hardware controls, I will be able to store Titan settings as part of the Pro Tools session, which will make life much easier and certainly speed up my workflow.”
Prism Sound’s MDIO-HDX module allows up to four Titan or Atlas units to be connected in a stack to each Pro Tools Digilink port and to automatically configure themselves to emulate Pro Tools HDIO interfaces. In the maximum configuration for a single Digilink, four Titan or Atlas units emulate two Pro Tools HDIO units, supporting up to 32 analog input and output channels. Only the first unit in the stack is connected to Pro Tools using its Primary connector. Additional units are added by daisy-chaining Expansion-to-Primary connections in the usual way. Multiple stacks can be connected to multiple host Digilink ports to build systems with larger numbers of channels.
“Titan delivers great sound quality, as one would expect from a Prism Sound product,” Oversby-Powell adds. “I’ve recently used mine to mix an album for producer Kelly Lee Owens and a live film for Polydor signing, Shura.”
His most successful project to date was mixing Fyfe’s album Control, which was released last year and has had over 14 million plays.
“That album was recorded on an Orpheus by the artist, mixed on my Orpheus and mastered on Dreams by (MPG Award winning mastering engineer) Mandy Parnell,” he says. “Quite a few of the projects I’ve mixed recently were also recorded using Prism Sound interfaces and you can really hear it in the audio quality of the tracks. I’m the first to recommend these interfaces to people who don’t have them because decent converters make everyone’s life so much easier.”
