London Bridge Studio is a mecca. It is a bastion of gear head fantasy with its vintage Neve 8048 console and drum room of Bonham delight. Being a gear head in London Bridge Studio is like being a necrophiliac in a morgue. There’s too much to like.

On the other side the inputs and keyboards is an enmeshed intestinal world of circuits and wire. There the gear head feeds. Underneath knobs, faders, and screens lies a minute constellation of geekdom and know how. Ram, bits, and chains run. Can you feel it? The beauty. Electricity is the soundcard’s dreaming.

When working with computers and sound, signals are constantly being translated from analog to digital and back again. When the guitar player lays down their part, and you are editing it on a computer, you want the quality of sound to be the highest it can be. When you burn the song to disc, you want the disc to sound as good as can, right? Of course you do.

A/D converters do the translating. Different types of converters operate at different resolutions. That resolution determines the sound quality. Then there is the dithering. Dithering takes signal and allows the computer to understand it. Having good converters can make your home recording. Converters can provide the magic.

Like the stone mason knows stone, and the astronaut — space, the gear head knows gear. And revels in gear. Jonathan Plum from London Bridge Studio is one of those gear heads. He spoke and revealed knowledge:

What do the converters do?
Plum: People are often unaware of how important A/D converters are. Or even what they are. An A/D Converter converts an analog audio signal into a digital signal. Any digital recording device has one. It's as much as an important link in the signal chain as your microphone, preamp, and cables are.

Get techie with it.
Gear heads like us at London Bridge can endlessly debate on which A/D converters sound better. The cheaper the home recording gear is the cheaper the A/D converters are. Now-a-days most musicians own some form of ProTools or something similar. Usually it's the LE version. LE stands for Light Edition. It also stands for cheap and shitty sounding. When you’re paying $1000 for a Digi 002 that has 8 ins, 8 outs, 4 Focusrite mic pre's, and headphones etc. How good of quality do you actually expect the A/D converter to be?

I don’t know, tell me. And stay geeky.
Well, it's not great. It's the main reason why a Digi 002 can't sound as good as a ProTools HD system. At London Bridge we spent upwards of $12,000 on just our converters alone in the form of three Digidesign 192's. This gives us thirty-two quality digital ins and outs from ProTools to our Neve mixing board.

So how can home recorders improve?
There are many manufacturers of quality stand alone converters that can be used in conjunction with an LE system. Here at London Bridge we just upgraded our private studio suites into two identical public overdub suites. Both rooms feature a ProTools Digi 002 system running the brand new ProTools 8 software with Apogee MiniMe A/D converters. These converters are the perfect solution to making an LE system run like a pro system. They are a simple two channel A/D converter that feeds directly into ProTools digitally. All they do is convert the audio signal into a digital signal which then is fed into ProTools digital input. Fortunately, the cheap components of the LE system are thus bypassed. The MiniMe's are also capable of going hi res which simply means they can sample at higher resolutions than the cd standard format of 44.1 Khz. The MiniMe can go up to 96 Khz. With these 2 channel converters we can record at exactly the same quality as our main Neve room can. Only 2 channels at a time. Which is really all you need when overdubbing.

God that is sexy.
I know.