The Tiny Audio Interface That Shocked the Pros | The Pro Audio Suite

You are any be history story. Welcome my name, Hi the Pro Audio Suite. Those guys are professional and motivated with text. The video stars George Wisam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International audio Engineer Darren, Robbo Roberts and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Triboo, Austrian Audio Making Passion, her Source Elements, George the Tech Wisdom, and Robbo and AP's international demos. To find out more about us, check the Pro Audio Suite dot com and welcome to another pro audio suite thanks to try booth. Don't forget the code t R I P A P two one hundred to get two hundred dollars off your plosive and Austrian Audio Making closives heard. Boy can pick the best plosives in the business. Yeah, exactly, exactly making closives. Heard now, George, you've been out bench testing with a couple of Techi dudes with our possible vehicles. Which bench was the best? Yeah? I was. So. I've been circulating back and forth to a repair shop here in Los Angeles called Audio Rehab, and my friends Greg and Scott. Greg owns the shop. Scott's one of the techs over there. Scott's like the avalon guy, so like every single avalon that needs to be serviced, bench restored, whatever it is, he's the guy. So I've had a few over there getting service for a few folks, and I was like, Hey, what do you do when you want to bench something to figure out the quality of or the noise or the distortion, etc. What's the procedure? Well, what we did manage to pull off with the cables and a daptors that we did have was that we did get to measure the essentially the self noise of the mic preamps in the passport vo and I do have a video that I shot while was at the shop of us doing that and they were impressed. Really right, Yeah, So pre amps are the Centrance Jasmine pre pre which is their own proprietary design, and they metered at minus eighty. Nine dB self noise. Wow? Or if that's the right terminology? Is that the terminology self noise? How? How when you measure the noise level of a preamp, what's the what is the criteria? Wouldn't it be self noise because that's the noise that it's creating itself? Right? Yeah? Technically right, exactly, and it was about minus eighty nine to minus ninety. And I don't know how that stacks up because I don't have a list of other you know, portable or you know, audio interfaces to stack that up again. So it's pretty damn love regardless. It's pretty damn low. Minus ninety is far lower than you're ever gonna hear by the ear. It's far lower than any recording environment you're going to record in, unless you're doing measurements in a lab. You know. And so really there's self noise of the product is essentially negligible. There's just no self noise that you can hear. So it was kind of neat and very It was neat seeing that on a bench, you know, in a shop where these guys calibrate, test in tune two, three, five, even more thousand dollars pres and channel strips all day long. It was really cool. So how is that tested? You open the mic pre all the way up to see the self noise or. Like, no, he didn't, he didn't. And that's that's the part I don't really know how to understand. And the test, frankly, it is not just testing the pre amp. It's also testing the headphone amp. And the reason is is because you have to get an analog signal out of the passport, and you cannot get an analog signal out of the passport unless it passes through the headphone amp. There's no line out puts on a passport VO And. It's funny because there's the speaker outputs. Yes, but they are and they do not pass the input. Remember they do not pass my input. Yeah, you know, we plugged everything in and they're like, we got nothing. And I was like, yeah, that's by designs. They're like they're like what, oh, so you know it's a unique product in that way. So yeah, headslap. So so the only way they could measure the true UH signal to noise ratio of the pre amp circuit was to essentially also measure the signal and noise ratio of the headphone circuit. That's even better. Yeah, so you're actually measuring those are two amplifiers. Yeah, that's right. So when you add together the pre amp and the headphone and meeting them together in concert, and again the headphones aren't balanced, right, you're getting minus eighty nine. I mean that's why when you plug a mic in and you plug cans, it always shocks you how clean it is. It really always does surprise me. This thing is clean, and that's why it really is. The circuitry is fantastic, and they were impressed, and they were also impressed by the size. They thought the build quality was really excellent. And another thing that was really encouraging was I asked them, I said, you know this thing, of course, because of its miniaturization, it's all surface mount right, And I was like, is that repaarable? And then the guy shows me on his bench a piece of gear he's repairing. It was a five hundred rack. It was a clear Borne or what's that click starts. With cranbar Born Craneborne or. Cranbourne I think Craveborn series rack and it had a surface mount component thing and he was servicing it and he said, oh yeah, he said, yeah, you got to have our steady hand and a big magnifying glass. But we service, yeah, we service all those surface mounts stuff. So that made me really encourage to know that it's this thing ever needed servicing, it's always going to be serviceable, you know, replacement. Some of it. So but when you look at that us B chip all the pins for it are under the chip, and Michael was saying that you need some heavy duty equipment to unsolder that that us be chip off the board because the pins don't go off the side, they're like underneath it. You can't get to the pins to. Kind of like an IC like an IC. It's a lot like a CPU, which yeah. Or CPU yeah right, And that design is making it harder to service things, there's no doubt about it. You know, that's actually. More crap in less space because there's no legs going out. Right, It's not a chip with legs like a spider sticking out in all directions. You know, it's just all underneath and there's no socket, right, it's not socketed. Right, yeah, Michael, I mean I guess maybe he could have put a socket on it. But and and actually so some of the reject units he was telling me, basically, the reason why they're rejected is because cold soder joints on those USB chips, and they're also that's walking and stuff super sensitive. Like that's one of the most challenging sensitive components. Of the whole product. Huh, This is those chips and they're the reason we're delayed on getting another. That was the gameships went out of production. So we're learning very hard about building product from small batch, small run you know, component suppliers. You know when when a company like Focus Write does it, they probably buy what one hundred thousand at a time. Yeah, or maybe the chip fab is like, oh, you want another one hundred thousand, Okay, we'll go roll out that fab again, but like here, like like another two hundred, like go away. Yeah, if you're only ordering two hundred, even in the case of Centrance, maybe a thousand of those chips at a time, those are small, small numbers, right. And for these chip manufactures. Yeah, yeah, the company decides that the demand for that chip is no longer there and they stop making it, and all of a sudden, you need one thousand more? Well sorry, Well. And I think they make a chip and they're like, Okay, this is a great ship. It's going to last, I believe, and maybe we want to cut this off, but I believe that ship is like a twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen ship we're using. It's it's not. And so the company that made them probably rolled out like ten twenty thousand of them or more and they sold them throughout the years, and we're sitting here in the end run of what's available. From them right right, and they're. Not motivated because they've made a new design. Yeah, when you source the chip and it's had a long life, then that's usually a good sign because that means it's stable, it's it's reliable, it's something that people have been using and they don't haven't had a need to upgrade it. So the last thing you expect for to do is just go out of production. Yeah, it's like my penny and forward ship to be replaced. Please that old come on? Yeah exactly. Yeah, So that was really it was really cool. So if you want to passport vo right now there, they are hard to come by. There are a few folks I know that might be if you twist their own hard enough, be willing to let theirs go. So let us know if you really really really want them bad but better off better is actually email centerence them directly? Yeah we really want please please, Like basically what has to happen is, you know. Pressure, we have to Michael Rome. Piles it up or or or or we get enough, but we have to basically assemble another order they're they're not. You know, no one's got the funds to run a huge batch of them to stock them up, and right, so no one wants to run a batch without knowing that the whole batch is sold. And I think what's going to happen is like, if there's gonna be another run out there, we're gonna have to just do another. Let's find the next hundred. Yeah yeah, yeah, Well see, we'll see how it goes. We'll see what and us see how the thing it picks up, you know, in terms of real world users and what. People are saying and how it's changed their lives. You know, when people buy these products, they it's usually not because they needed it today. It's because they needed it two years ago, right, And so. When they get it, they probably had to source something in instead. And so now they're getting them and they're finally getting to put them into place, and they're deciding, is this better than what I already have? Oh my god it is? Or how do I make this adapt into my workflow, et cetera. Right now, I have a studio in North Carolina and or South Carolina, Greenville, and you know, she's setting learning how to get this working in her booth where you know it's going to be on a thirty foot long USB. Cable, right, wow, And so that all has to be tested. And the optical ones that you're using. I recommended that cable to her, so you know it's a beta test. We it's not like we have twenty five people all using the same setup. Right, So she's going to get that cable running into the booth. She has to get the right adapters to go from the thing to the thing, and blah blah blah. It's if you're not a geek, it's it's a lot to understand. You get all these other you need all these different little adapters and cables and such. I even had her get a dedicated volume knob that she puts on her desk just for her speakers, right because of passports inside the booth. So that's all it happens. So are you using the auxiliary out in the speaker mode for that desk. Or you know we're running the we're running mike cables from the booth all the way back to her desk out the the mike cables will plug into the x l R two Mini t R S adapters right to the head to the monitor outputs right. So we're running the proper balanced out to the passport down a pair of white cables to the desk. Those are plugged into a I think it's called a knob sound, you know, passive volume knob and then that goes XL R in and has XLR out. That's cool too because it has r C A and XLR out so it has a built in impedance matched input on totput. Yeah, so you can plug it into two sets of monitors or whatever. And then that's what she said. You just floor the monitor knob, the speaker knob on the passport. You just floor it right. Right, and then the knob sounds to an intenuator just it just takes down the volume exactly. So that's what we're going to get set up in her place and looking forward to hearing how it turns out and what she says about it. So we'll report back see how we got beautiful. I don't forget arrests, Michael. If you want a passport. That was fun is over. The pro Audio Suite and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect. Edited by Andrew Peters, mixed by Robbo. Got your own audio issues. Just ask Robbo dot com. Text record from George the Tech Window. 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