Prism Orpheus v. Apogee Rosetta 800 = Fatality...

Prism Sound, makers of ludicrously high-end A/D/A, are releasing a converter for the Rest Of Us. Assuming The Rest Of Us are sleeping on mattresses full of money, and for whatever reason find the Rosetta 800 to be something we can’t get along with.

Product details here, but in a nutshell, it’s an 8 I/O FW interface with four mic pres and some nice monitoring features. This is basically a much higher end iteration of the Apogee Ensemble feature set, only not OSX-centric. Of course, for the price (?2500 is the going rumor) you could buy two Ensembles, so there’s that. But for a single rack space 8 I/O with four mic pres, FW, and ADAT I/O, this is going to be as good as you’re gonna get. Costs about the same as a Rosetta 800 if you bought four mic pres to go with it, so the price is in line.

From the provided materials, and assuming it has the same quality as all other Prism converters, this might be the way to go for the top-flight home studio. (Or a small commercial room, post room, or jingle factory.) My way of thinking is thus: life is far too short to spend any time worrying whether your audio I/O is up to snuff. You might as well just start at the top of the market, which is de facto snuff.

EDIT: Actually, in thinking about it, this unit does have some problems. Like: S/PDIF? Yuck. I don’t care about the lack of S/MUX ADAT, but the sort of person that would buy this unit (e.g. me) has top-end kit already, and S/PDIF is not in that equation. If I was Prism, I’d get rid of the entire existing digital section, and make it a card that could be either DSUB AES or ADAT S/MUX (since people rarely need both.) But I’m not Prism, so it’s just left to ponder.