X:144
“I’ve spent the better part of this year looking for converters that meet my expectations of what I think the source material should sound like. Being a mixer one of my biggest concerns was D to A conversion. Burl is renowned for their transformer laced AD, which is mostly what the audio world has been raving about. But not enough has been said about it’s DA and how well it performs. In my hybrid mixing rig what’s hitting analog summing is paramount. It became more and more apparent to me that the optics in which we “see” the audio is critical. When I first heard the BDA8, at first I didn’t know what to make of what I was hearing…everything sounded so big. And I mean BIG, across the entire spectrum there’s a size and space that I wasn’t accustom to. There’s a smooth yet detailed richness to the sound without any clutter ANYWHERE in the spectrum…makes me wonder if we’ll ever know what things really sound like inside the box…but with how the BDA8 sounds, I’m starting to care less about that.
Here’s the thing that trips me out…anything anyone has ever said about the BDA8 has been that it’s transparent and clear…but that really doesn’t do it justice! There’s a size and dimensionality that’s difficult to compete with. And the trick isn’t with how clear it sounds…it’s what happens when you start making decisions during your mix that changes everything. It interprets equalization and compression in the most beautiful and musical way that I’ve ever heard it done. It changes your concrete perception on what “digital audio” sounds like. Things just flow much easier with a wealth of directional options in the soundstage. The flip side to that is that this amount of depth causes you to travel deeper into the soundstage, which at first feels like a bit more work until you get to know what “room you’re in”. To sum up my clinical first impression…this BDA8 sounds massive. They’re a a huge compliment to my beloved Mytek’s and put my once Apogee 16x rig to complete shame. You’ve heard it once before and you’ll hear it again…these converters have BALLS.
Recently I mixed Qusai’s forthcoming album. The Mothership was used on every second of this record. I can’t wait to tell you more about it. “