If You Don't Know, Now You Know... Black Lion Audio 003R Modification

There's no doubt there is quite a price gap between Pro Tools LE & Pro Tools HD. There's also no doubt you have access to far greater sonic potential using HD but, affording a true Pro Tools HD TDM based system can be quite costly. While Pro Tools LE doesn't have TDM capabilities it is still quite capable of recording, mixing down & mastering a professional sounding album if you have the right tools. That's where the Black Lion Audio 003R Mod comes in. This blog is for my bedroom audio geeks, the people in their rooms grinding hard... Black Lion Audio modded the 003R for all you so you don't have to spend 10 grand on an HD System... Get yourself a modded 003R from Black Lion Audio and the world will have absolutely no idea you don't have some big bad mean and nasty HD system sitting in your room. I could spend a few paragraphs documenting posts from GearSlutz and Info from Black Lion or I could just copy and paste this statement from Matt Newport the owner of Black Lion Audio.

"We have a customer in Milwaukee that did some tracking for a major label R&B release. The label paired him with a multi-million dollar facility in Reno, Nevada to handle mix-down. When the mix-down studio guys heard the tracks, they were so impressed that they asked our customer about his recording setup. He told them what he was using but they refused to believe him. The owner of the studio actually flew to Milwaukee just to see our customer's setup: one of our Signature Series 003R's and two of our Auteur preamps. He was furious when he saw it, because he said it sounded as good as his million dollar system yet it cost so much less. I think that says a lot about not only the state of our industry, but also about what we're doing as a company. The large amount of expense required to operate a large facility like that is becoming less and less feasible."

I think that pretty much sums up the reason why I started this blog all in one short paragraph from someone who has no idea this place even exists. Major studios can't afford to keep their doors open anymore. Especially, when it's evident YOU or I with a little practice, training & some Black Lion gear can scare the living crap out of a guy who owns a multi-million dollar studio. You can have the same sound the pro's do all from the comfort of your home and in the end, not subject your productions to the ideals of someone else who pays a lot of money for you to have that same sound in a professional studio. If you record anything, anything at all into your Pro Tools LE setup (or any native DAW for that matter) there is no doubt in my mind that a Modded 003R from Black Lion Audio has to be your next purchase. Mine will be, this is no joke and I can't wait! Imagine recording your analog synths into Pro Tools and actually getting a nice digital audio representation of it. That would be nice. (day dreaming....) I haven't heard of an m-box or a standard 003 doing that yet. Fact is the digi hardware is crap... even the HD stuff... (I just said that) Let Black Lion Audio give your work the sonic touch you thought was a $100,000,000 record contract away! Be sure to read all of the 003R upgrade page at Black Lion, they do a fantastic job of explaining all the stock elements of the 003R and how they improve them. It's a good learning experience for those not familiar with a 003R as well as an excellent promotional tool for their fantastic product. Support companies like Black Lion Audio, companies that genuinely care about their product and their customers!

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Quality Gear for the Masses Pt. 1 of ??? (The Audio Interface)

As I've said before, I'm writing this blog for all the bedroom producers & DJ's out there. One of the things I'd like do is show people the massive difference quality gear can make. Quality is one of the many things that separates the pros from the amateurs. The best tools won't make a crappy musician sound good but, the best tools will surely make a good musician sound better. Second to having good musicians with nice instruments is having quality tools to process all this sound you'd like to create. This being said, lets start this quality gear for the masses campaign with the audio interface.

Before we get started if you're making music completely inside of the box (on your computer) than you don't need to worry so much about a quality audio interface. Because, the only thing the interface is going to do is clean up what you're hearing through your monitors, which is helpful but, that sound won't exist on your project unless you bounce it through the interface and back to another multi-track recording system. However if you do use outboard gear like synths, compressors, reverbs and so on, you are going to definitely want to think about purchasing a quality audio interface.

Let's assume you have a Mirco Korg, you would run the analog outs of that synthesizer into your audio interface so that you could capture the sound onto your computer. There is a critical sound quality link in between the Micro Korg and your computer. That's the interface, which contains an analog to digital and digital to analog converter. Analog audio is pure as can be, it is an actual waveform. When you capture that analog sound to digital recording software, those analog signals are converted to digital audio signals. This is where the conversion comes in. Digital audio is simply a representation of a waveform, not the actual waveform. It uses binary, 1 & 0's to represent what it can from the waveform. There will always be a loss of sonic quality when converting analog sound to digital sound. This is because computers interpolate (or guess) exactly how the waveform looks. So, it's never a perfect representation of the analog sound. If you have a high quality A/D D/A converter in your interface that can achieve ultra high sample rates the interpolation process is going to be reduced and much smoother as there are more 1 & 0's in the binary word to represent the analog waveform. Making sense??? Higher sample rates provide a more accurate representation of the actual analog waveform. Thereby increasing overall audio quality.

The pre-amps in the interface are also equally important, a good preamp will do wonders to your sound and this part of the interface should not be overlooked. While the analog to digital and digital to analog process is important. With good pre-amps you can further maximize your sound and really drive the sound your creating.

DJ's & Live Performers I haven't forgot about you. You too need a high quality interface if you're performing using a computer with out an analog mixer. An example would be someone using Ableton Live to perform. If you have something like an Apogee Duet you are going to notice an insane audio quality boost of what you're playing. Especially if you were only using your computers sound card. You want the people to feel the music right??? Do what you can to make it sound fantastic and people are going to feel it all that much more.

I'm not going to say much about these other than just give you links so you can do your own research, but this list of links should give you a nice jumping off point. If I posted it on here, it is high quality and something you will want to take a look at. Before you start clicking links, you should know, none of these are inexpensive, it's high quality professional audio gear and unfortunately that comes at a price. There are also PCI Interfaces, these are VERY high quality and typically VERY expensive. For now we will stick to USB & Firewire Interfaces. If you have any questions about PCI Interfaces feel free to ask. But I assume, most people looking at PCI interfaces aren't going to need to be asking me any questions. With that let's check out some of these interfaces. A few of the interfaces listed below have only 2 channels while others up to 28 in's and out's. The choice is yours to make, enjoy and happy searching & listening!

RME- Fireface 400
Apogee- Duet
Metric Halo- ULN-2
Motu- 896mk3
Apogee-Ensemble
Echo- Audiofire 8
Focusrite- Liquid Saffire 56
RME- Fireface 800 I WANT, I WANT, I WANT!!!