So these Prism interfaces are now offered at 33% off. Any info as to what is the reason? And also, is anyone running the Ultimate Collection software on Mac silicon, and what is your opinion of it?

They are running the sale only to 11/25. The usual reason is a glut of stock and to encourage buying for the holiday season. Nothing really unusual about this. (For high-priced items, these kind of sales start early to nab consumer spending before consumers spend on general shopping at/after Black Friday.)
The idea is to move stock before the end of the quarter/calendar year.

As a one time manufacturer, do not be alarmed.

There could be a whole heap of reasons, but usually its to do with generating revenue.

Also Prism is the one company who keeps the same product going for a very, very long time.

Of course now I 've said that....

Prism Sound Titan is $3,149 now ($1,575 off). Now that’s a great deal.

Between that and a RME UFX III, what's best?

I know the RME has solid drivers and is expendable, is the sound of the prism worth the compromise?

Ok I forgot that very strangely there have been a number of knock off Prism units floating round in the far east.

I find this bizarre as if you were going to the trouble of counterfeiting something you probably go with something mainstream rather than a highly niche, high quality audio interface.

Unless of course you happened to work in the factory assembling them and offered to lock up that evening...

You can now see Prism units in a sexy red colour for the Far east market.

Regarding UFXIII, it is far more versatile and can do many more things and is rock solid. IMHO the Prism just sounds better, BUT unless its delicate acoustic stuff the benefit probably would not be noticed.

I use RME a lot in the day but listen to Prism at night for myself.

The question is if the headache and pop&crackles worth the hassle is..
a stable system is very (the most) important for me.

Best of both world is the converters you want, with an rme digital interface..



Cheu

So the prism drivers are that bad?

Is the sound difference noticable on the DA side?
I'd use it mostly to feed my summing box.

I've been using Titan for years with a mac and the drivers have been perfect, not a glitch.
I sometimes use it with RME Raydat via adat, really don't notice a difference.

Thanks, I'm on windows these day but good to know it's solid on mac.

Good point. D/A is very close on both units.

But I love up sampling everything to hear the difference on the Prism. (e.g. 44.1kHz becomes 192kHz)

Up until very recently RME fed my summing box. It was fine.

TBH I have not done any mixing OTB in the last month and have not yet tried the Prism instead.

Interesting, I've sold most of my gear in the last years, went completely ITB. I recently worked on a master and thought I'd run it through my great river MixMaster 20 summing mixer, I liked what I heard and it made me wonder if I should use it again as a summing box, not sure how much I would gain with multiple channels vs 2 since I don't have hardware anymore to integrate with it...

Anyway, I now use a RME ADI-2 Pro FS R, it sounds good, nothing magic but pretty detailed. Using it has my only AD/DA is a bit restrictive, for example I can't run my headphones balanced if I also want to feed an analog component. The UFX III seems like it would be very easy to integrate into my setup and expand on later but the prism sound (with the current discount) is really intriguing!

I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that there's not another company out there like rme.

For sure prism (and this might be true also depending what system do you use, windows/mac, and which version of the operating system) had quite a bit of pissed off users..

I'm sure in some config they work fine.. and they sound pretty good indeed.
if latency is not a big deal, you might be happy.. some users were definitely not..
that's where my comment comes from..

I do think that prism does great sounding converters..some of the best..

If you are on PT, the avid I/O offer a great multichannel converter for their used price (very difficult to beat), but it will need a machine room or a closed rack (because of the fan).



Cheu

Just to be clear I have been running a Prism via various adapters and the wrong OS (Win on a Mac).

In perhaps 2 months of 8 hours a day I have heard one relay go click but it did not affect the recording.

My RME experience is two decades worth and nothing ever has gone wrong, which is odd now I think about it. That's almost impossible!

Did you find out why?

Yeah I read a bit about those driver issue or poor performance. I also heard the quality of the knob on the Lyra 2 is not that great and easily broken.

Sound quality is one thing, and pretty desirable, but I also want reliability, I`m so tired of waisting time with broken stuff that cost a fortune.

I used to own a ProTools HDX system with a total of 32 i/o, it sounded good, I liked it better than the Apogee symphony MKI I had before that, which had a channel die 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty, to top it off the Apogee failure also damaged the Dagerous Liaison I had hooked up to it, so that had to be repaired too.

Thanks for sharing your experience, how has latency been on your system?

I mostly work at 96Khz these days, could the Prism handle a big mixing session at that sample rate (around 80 tracks, lots of plugins)? I usually have to run my RME at buffer size 2048 to avoid glitches.

Been using an Atlas on Mac for about 4 years without a glitch. Love the sound.

If you want RME drivers for the lowest latency, then grab a digital unit and connect the two up. The best of both worlds.

Thanks.

As this is a proper question I will wait till I go home and check. What I can say is I have not noticed, but to be fair just been doing some mixing and mastering and have not tried virtual synths etc. which is where I might notice the latency.

TBH I have not tweaked anything too much as I did not expect it to work at all and I keep getting distracted by the lovely sound when I should be doing scientific investigations.

Can the digital out handle all 8 channels at 192khz? I do like the idea of using RME for the drivers and Prism for the sound....

I'd be very interested in learning what you find regarding latency and lots of virtual synths and plugins enabled -- as that's my workflow. I so badly want Prism to work for me but I might have to rely on RME for reliability / latency. :(

The Atlas has 8 channels of ADAT at 44 & 48. It drops to 4 channels at 88 and up. I work at 48.

I personally don’t think you need to worry about reliability. From experience they are well designed and built interfaces, that just get on with the job. The volume control knob could be more solid, but it works fine. Also the software mixer, is a little confusing and not as advanced as RME Total Mix (which some also find confusing).

As to latency, I’ve used mine mostly for playing midi parts into sometimes quite advanced mixes, I use Logic, so using its low latency mode, never had any problems, but I know people have different perceptions of latency.

I've been using my Atlas dang near every day for 8 years; very happy with the reliability. I use a cheap RME interface so I have access to RME PC drivers + Totalmix, but the hardware / conversion on the Prism has been solid af.

Do you send the Atlas digitally to the RME, then? The problem is you can't get the full 8 channels above 48kHz. Does that work for you? I work in 96.

Yes, ADAT, I work in 44.1

Why would these units not include two sets of adat io? What am I missing?

Most interfaces that have ADAT don’t.

I’ve been using a Titan for 6 or so years without a problem, both on PC and Mac. Have no issue with software or hardware so far and the sound of the converters is really all you could ever need.