Airshow Mastering Increases Its Transfer Rates With A Prism Sound Lyra 2 Audio Interface

Colorado-based Airshow Mastering has upgraded the audio conversion in its production room by installing a Prism Sound Lyra 2 audio interface so that it can offer clients a transfer rate of 192k.

The company already has a Prism Sound flagship ADA-8XR audio converter in its main studio and was therefore familiar with Prism Sound’s products.

Airshow’s Founder and Chief Engineer David Glasser says: “We received a contract for a large archiving project that specified all transfers must be at 192k. That meant upgrading the converter in our production room, which is where most of our transfer work is carried out, so that we could meet the terms of the contract. A Lyra 2 was the obvious choice because we trusted Prism Sound’s audio and build quality.”

After some initial confusion about the unit’s architecture and capabilities, Glasser says he found the Lyra 2’s setup was a breeze.

“The Lyra sounds very open and detailed and it brings the production room’s audio conversion quality up to the level of our mastering studio,” he says.

Glasser also took the opportunity to install Prism Sound’s Verifile software that now comes as standard with all of the company’s audio conversion products. Launched in 2018 after extensive testing by many of the world’s leading broadcast, recording, mastering and archival organisations, this revolutionary software overcomes issues of reliability by allowing computer audio recordings to be quickly checked for a wide range of errors and dropouts, without any compromise in the audio content or any additional metadata. Airshow Mastering has now incorporated Verifle into all of its QC routines.

Established by David Glasser in 1983, Airshow Mastering is located in a secluded mountain property close to Boulder. The TEC-Award nominated studio, designed by Sam Berkow of SIA Acoustics, is equipped with a Maselec MTC-6 5.1 analogue transfer and monitor console, a 5.1 monitoring system based around Dunlavy speakers with Ayre Acoustics amps and dual Paradigm Servo-15 subs, and various workstations including Sonic Studio soundBlade, ProTools, and Sony Sonoma.

“The studio is a Plangent Processes authorized transfer facility, using custom heads and replay electronics on our Ampex ATR and Studio A820 1/4 and 1/2” tape machines,” Glasser says. “Our latest offering is mastering for MQA (Master Quality Authenticated), an end-to-end process that assures that consumers have the same listening experience that the artist approved during mastering.”

Airshow Mastering customers include some of the biggest names in the music industry and the projects completed here have won numerous GRAMMY awards and collected over 100 GRAMMY nominations. Recent releases completed by Glasser include the 50th Anniversary Editions of The Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty; Front Street Outtakes from Jerry Garcia and Sanjay Mishra; Comet from Firefall; and On The Road: A Tribute to John Hartford, featuring a who’s who of jamgrass artists. Senior Mastering Engineer and Restoration Centre Manager Anna Frick’s most recent mastering projects include releases from Wood and Wire and Cyril Neville.

For more information about Airshow Mastering, please visit www.airshowmastering.com

About Prism Sound
Founded in 1987, Prism Sound manufacture professional digital audio equipment for the international broadcast, film and music production sectors. The company’s products are renowned for their exceptional audio quality and are the converters and interfaces of choice for many of the world’s top artists, producers, composers, mixing and mastering engineers. They are also the mainstay of many internationally acclaimed audio facilities including Metropolis Studios, Sony, ESPN, the Library of Congress and Walt Disney. Prism Sound also produces SADiE audio production workstation software, which is used by major national broadcasters such as the BBC and Radio France, as well as many of the world’s leading mastering houses and classical and live music recording engineers.

For more information: www.prismsound.com