Finding himself doing monitors for Will Young and David Gilmour, some high-profile, one-off shows with Britannia Row Productions and the Evening Standard Theatre awards in recent months, freelance recording/live engineer Gavin Tempany is well placed to evaluate his recently acquired Audient, iD22 and iD4 USB audio interfaces.
While the iD22 remains in his studio, the bus powered iD4 was built for life on the road: ‘We’ve been working on a record for a new pop artist at the studio for a while now, and I had some time to do some editing and pre-mixing in the hotel room,’ he says. ‘It’s extremely handy that the unit is bus powered. I found it drove my headphones surprisingly well.
Tempany is no stranger to high-performance mic preamps, with a studio at his Oxford home as well as a shared professional studio space in West London. ‘I have been using the iD22 as a D/A for my home studio a lot,’ he says. ‘I’ve got great sounding converters [Black lion modded Avid interfaces] both at home and in my studio in Chiswick. When Pro Tools is in use, however, I can’t use these converters to reference things like iTunes and Spotify. I’ve found the iD22 to be really quite close in terms of audio quality. Considering the price difference, the audio difference is very small. I’m been thinking about putting the iD4 or another iD22 into the studio to get around this limitation.’
Tempany also intends to use the iD4 to help tune PA systems: ‘Like recording music, it’s important that good digital conversion and good mic preamps are part of the signal chain while doing measurements on PA systems,’ he explains. ‘I usually use the actual sound desk connected via Madi or its native digital format, so that the desk becomes part of the measurement chain. Sometimes this is not possible and one requires a high quality interface to do this. I’m hoping the iD4 D.I input will work for a line level source and that the mic pre will be used for the measurement mic. Yet to be tested.’
Right now, the BBC music awards and Jingle Bell Ball are occupying his time: ‘I have to be able to pay for my recording gear somehow,’ he says.
More: www.audient.com
