The sonic characteristics of a good converter can be difficult to judge. Should it be neutral and natural or warm and colored?

We are often asked, what does the converter sound like? After all, when clients spend hard earned money they often expect to hear some kind of ground-breaking, hit-making effect. But converters are an altogether different beast from other processing equipment. Their purpose is to dismiss the effects of the step-based digital domain beyond any audible point to the best of their ability. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t hear your converters at all, allowing your DAW to be a transparent storage facility for your audio tracks.

Sure, invisibility in the conversion stage is an ideal, but one that gets closer by the day as technology advances and costs come down. The ultimate is now more affordable than ever.

Funky Junk were the first ones to receive the Orpheus units – in fact, the first five ever shipped (serial numbers 16, 34, 47, 61 and 64) were delivered to Funky Junk London on the Friday before Christmas by Mr. Prism himself – Graham Boswell. I was lucky enough to test-drive the units myself before anybody else, other than the Prism A+D techs, of course.

Prism's In Stock at Funky Junk 

I have tested the Orpheus in as many practical situations as possible and all I can say is that it doesn't have a particularly distinctive sound. In fact, it is as transparent as can be, which is, in fact, the hallmark of a good converter. The definition on the bottom and top ends when recording and playing back at 44.1/48 kHz (and especially at 96 kHz) were perfect, as was the stereo imaging. Technologically speaking, at such a modest price point the Orpheus unit is actually superior to the “king of the hill” of converters – the Prism ADA-8 – as it uses newer components and a more developed design.

The four mic pre's are clean and transparent (ideal for classical recordings and acoustic instruments). They don't color the sound and lack any notable character - they are high quality pre-amps, pure and simple. Gain is controlled via the software panel which also includes built-in M/S decoding for the first and second pair of mic pre's (very useful for stereo recordings which can save quite a bit of hassle). Amongst other tests, I recorded acoustic guitar on a very busy Logic session (with loads of heavy plug-ins like Sonnox and Waves), monitoring via one of the on-board very clean headphone outputs. The recording ran smoothly at 128 samples buffer with no noticeable latency. Again, the sound was clean and probably as close to the original sound of the microphone as possible. And although the unit has a generous amount of headroom, I was pushing the mic pre's on purpose in order to test the "Overkillers" clipping protection which indeed provided a smooth and inaudible clipping of the signal without the typical harsh clip & click of many other inbuilt limiters. In short, the front end worked like a charm.

Up close and personal

When two Orpheus’ were daisy-chained and fed from the 16 analogue outputs into the 16 inputs of a Neve 8816 summing mixer with an analogue-to-digital converter card which was connected back into the Orpheus via AES/EBU, the results were superb. The AES/EBU in/outs are an additional feature which Prism added to the unit to allows the inserting and sending out an AES3 signal via the on-board S/PDIF ports using the supplied S/PDIF-to-and-from-AES/EBU converter cables. This is a very common scenario these days when an analogue summing mixer is used to "analogue things up" (as oppose to summing/bouncing "in the box") bearing in mind (of course) that different summing mixers provide varying flavors and effects according to the technologies utilized (tube, solid state, transformers, etc...) - but that is a different article (check back for more on this). Again, this worked very nicely and with no hassle. I could bounce the signal back into Logic and even monitor the signal with mastering processing without any delays. Even when two Orpheus units were connected to the same FireWire 400 port of my MacBook Pro outputting on all 16 analog ports at 48 kHz, there was enough bandwidth to bounce back with no noticeable latency.

The software control panel offers extensive (in fact, full) control over the unit, including the saving and restoration/recall of session configuration, metering source, sync sources, levels, session configuration store/load, etc... Though the user interface is not the most user-friendly in the world, it is logical and easy to get used to. It is worth mentioning that in my recent conversations with Prism I have learnt that they are already working on improving the ‘user experience’. For example,  my initial impression of the manual is that it could use some improvements (with things like "TODO: insert more information about syncing..." that were accidentally left in the final print). Hmmm…it appears that they've printed the draft file instead of the final version but the correct manual is available immediately on the Prism website and will be shipped with future units. You could say that some of you lucky Orpheus owners got a limited edition manual :)

Shipped in a nice, solid, shiny box, physically the Orpheus is very well built - beautiful and sturdy. The connectors on the back feel as if they should last a lifetime. Most importantly, at 25W, the unit doesn't run hot, though a 1U rack spacer above is recommended. The front panel meters look great (plasma-lava-lamp-color-changing-hypnotizing meters), but offer little information about the actual signals level – that is, you can tell if the signal is low, high or clipping, but if won’t tell you that it is -24dBu exactly. The good thing about the meters is that you can select in the control panel the meters source – input or output – which came very handy during tracking and later during mixing.

'Sounds good to me...' - An Orpheus being put through its paces by an 'analogue crusty'.

Sonically, this is by far the best audio interface I have ever heard. As always, Prism products are leagues in front of anybody else and if past performance is anything to go by, they will remain one step ahead of the pack for a considerable time to come. In short, the Orpheus is not merely a great audio interface but is also a wise investment.

Adam Crowe