Prism Sound has announced that noted engineer and producer Francesco Cameli, the person behind both the London and Los Angeles iterations of Sphere Studios, has become one of the first to own a new Dream ADA-128 multichannel converter.
“It’s impressive,” says Cameli, who has been using Prism Sound converters for more that 20 years. “The audio quality is everything you would expect from a Prism Sound product. It is sonically accurate and doesn’t colour the sound in any way, which is exactly what I want from a converter. I would far rather work with a converter that gives me a true representation of what I am recording, rather than something that makes everything sound warmer and brighter than it is. Prism Sound conversion is always honest, and this new unit continues that pedigree.”
In 2001 at the ago of 22, he opened the multi-room Sphere Studios in London and ran it for 14 years before deciding to relocate to Los Angeles. Over the years, Sphere Studios has hosted sessions for numerous noted artists and producers, including Queen, Genesis and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Cameli has also achieved recognition in winning two Tech awards for his work with Adele on 21 and for the soundtrack for the James Bond film Skyfall.
Prism Sound converters consistently been a part of the Sphere Studios experience and Cameli owned a large collection of the company’s ADA-8RX multi-channel modular AD/DA converters, which relocated to the U.S. with him in 2015. When he sold Sphere Studios LA in 2022, he kept one of the older Prism Sound converters, a Pro Tools rig, his vintage guitar collection and four drum kits. These, along with the vintage G Series SSL Console that he later bought back from Sphere Studios’ new owners, form the basis of his recording and mixing setup at his home in California.
The Dream ADA-128 is a modular audio converter offering up to 128 channels of 32-bit A/D and D/A conversion at stated sample rates of up to 768 kHz. It’s housed in a 2RU mainframe that can be fitted with up to 16 analog and digital IO modules (each of which nominally provides eight input or output ports, or both). Up to four host modules provide bidirectional multi-channel connections to host computers, workstations, networks etc, with the ADA-128 providing routing between all of these inputs and outputs under user control, as well as a wide range of processing functions.
“My ADA-128 is set up as a single user unit, but because it has four host ports at the rear I could, in theory, add three more host cards and significantly expand the system,” Cameli explains. “If this unit had existed when I built the first Sphere complex, I could have put a couple of them in my central machine room and simply assigned I/O to wherever it was needed. Genius! I can certainly see the benefits of having a modular system and I am sure there will be a lot of larger facilities that will also appreciate it.”
