Prism Sound, manufacturer of the Callia hifi DAC, pre-amplifier and headphone amp, has seen a significant investment in its pro products by Mark Knopfler’s British Grove Studios, buying enough PT-HDX compatible interface cards to ensure that every one of its Prism Sound ADA-8XR multichannel converters can now connect to its six Pro Tools® HDX™ systems.

British Grove Studios bought its first ADA-8XR units in 2006 and has been regularly adding to its collection. The converters have been used on numerous projects for Mark Knopfler, as well as other high profile artists such as Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, The Who Led Zeppelin and Razorlight. They have also been used on film projects such as Beauty and The Beast, Mary Poppins Returns, Gravity and Mission Impossible 5, to name but a few.

The two-studio complex in London now has 24 ADA-8XR converters – more than any other studio in the world. With this number of units, British Grove can offer its customers a total of 192 channels of Prism Sound conversion.

Studio manager David Stewart (pictured) says: “We originally chose Prism Sound’s flagship ADA-8XR converters because they sound great, which is an important consideration for Mark and our commercial clients. They also operate at sampling rates of up to 192kHz, giving us even greater analogue performance than their ADA-8 predecessors.

“In recent months we’ve been upgrading all our Pro Tools rigs to HDX and we wanted to ensure that the Prism Sound units continued to work flawlessly with these new systems. The cards connect directly with Pro Tools|HDX interface cards and emulate the behaviour of the Avid HD I/O interfaces. By future-proofing our facility in this way we can ensure that our clients have the best of both worlds – the workflow benefits of Pro Tools HDX and the exceptional audio quality of Prism Sound.”

Prism Sound sales and marketing director Graham Boswell says: “All of us at Prism Sound are very proud of our association with British Grove – an award-winning studio that is renowned for the incredible attention it pays to every tiny detail, whether technical or aesthetic. The fact that David and his team have invested in more than 20 HDX interface cards shows that Prism Sound conversion is important to them and will continue to be part of this facility’s long-term future.”

The company’s first hifi product, the Callia DAC, uses the same DAC circuits as those found in the company’s professional Lyra 2 recording interface, allowing home listeners to hear their music as it sounded in the studio. Headphone users are also catered for with a headphone amplifier with its own separate volume control potentiometer.