Studio Gear We Recommend
We all love being able to come into New Adelphi Recording Studios to record, mix and synthesise. But often there's simply not enough time to get everything done, so you might want to consider building your own small setup at home... Or maybe you just want a good pair of headphones. Here you can find a whole series of recommendations on equipment at a few different price points depending on what you can afford.
Audio Interfaces
The 'Audio Interface' is the starting point and lynchpin for all computer recording, the functionality and quality available varies massively depending on what you want to achieve with your studio setup vs. what level of quality you are willing to accept. For home recording an Audio Interface generally combines a few different jobs that might be split over several pieces of equipment in a the most expensive studio rigs, this can be divided into 3 main elements:
The Mixing Desk
In a classic studio setup you would likely have some form of exciting full mixing desk made by someone like Neve, Api, SSL, or Audient. The desk would feature at the very least a pre-amp, an EQ, auxiliaries, and two faders per channel and would be the centre of the recording studio, the hub of where audio is to be routed. The routing/mixing element is often replaced with software specific to the interface you are using to allow you maximum flexibility when using your interface, while the microphone pre-amps, inputs and outputs are build into the hardware of the unit. Some will even come with basic EQ or DSP (Onboard Digital Signal Processing) plugins to cover some of the other elements of a mixing desk.
Conversion
Whenever we work with a computer to recording audio we need to convert that signal from the analogue electrical audio signal to a digital signal the computer understands. We do this with analogue to digital converters, we also need to do this process in reverse to hear our audio back from the computer too: converting digital to analogue. Often a studio will have stand-alone converters which complete this process but most home studio interfaces will include this onboard (and often boast how clean and amazing their particular brand of conversion sounds).
The Interface
The final part of the process is taking the newly digitised audio and feeding it into your computer, usually onto a hard drive of some description, sometimes this task is also done by the converter but often very high specification converters will require some form of interface between themselves and the computer, this will often be some form of PCIe card that connects to your computer. Generally this is also included in the box of home audio interfaces as well and is usually completed via USB or Thunderbolt.
It's possible to spend unfathomable amounts of money on the three different elements and sometimes possible even to break this process down into even more granular parts, but generally this is reserved for only the most wealthy studios. In the mean time there are lots of excellent audio interfaces which achieve the job well depending on your budget, here are some that we recommend:
