Freelance recording and concert engineer, Gavin Tempany has bought himself a couple of Audient USB audio interfaces, iD22 and iD4. The latter – and smaller, more portable of the two – has already become a fixture in his mobile gig bag. Finding himself busy doing monitors for Will Young and David Gilmour, (“They’re both complete gentlemen”); some high profile, one-off shows with Britannia Row Productions, including FOH at Children in Need Rocks at the Albert Hall, Centrepoint foundation charity event at Kensington Palace and the Evening Standard Theatre awards over the last few months, it’s a surprise that he’s had time for his studio projects.
iD4: “I found it drove my headphones surprisingly well”
Yet the bus powered iD4 with its versatile feature set was built for life on the road. “We’ve been working on a record for a new pop artist at the studio for a while now, and I had some time before shows and days off to do some editing and pre-mixing in the hotel room. It’s extremely handy that the unit is bus powered. I found it drove my headphones surprisingly well,” he confirms.
Tempany is certainly no stranger to having high performance mic pres at his fingertips, with a studio setup at his Oxford home as well as a shared professional studio space in west London. “I have been using the iD22 as a D/A for my home studio a lot,” he adds, highlighting the audio interface’s high performance Burr-Brown converters. “I’ve got great sounding converters (Black lion modded Avid interfaces) both at home and in my studio in Chiswick. When ProTools is in use however, I can’t use these converters to reference things like iTunes and Spotify. I’ve found the iD22 to be really quite close in terms of audio quality. Considering the price difference, the audio difference is very small. I’m been thinking about putting the iD4 or another iD22 into the studio to get around this limitation.” High praise indeed.
“Like recording music, it’s important that good digital conversion and good mic pre’s are part of the signal chain while doing measurements on PA systems”
He’s also got a plan to use the iD4 to help tune PA systems, when he’s got his live hat on. “Like recording music, it’s important that good digital conversion and good mic pre’s are part of the signal chain while doing measurements on PA systems. I usually use the actual sound desk connected via MADI or its native digital format, so that the desk becomes part of the measurement chain. Sometimes this is not possible and one requires a high quality interface to do this. I’m hoping the iD4 D.I input will work for a line level source and that the mic pre will be used for the measurement mic. Yet to be tested!”
Audient looks forward to feedback from Tempany when he tries it. It sounds like it might take a while though as his feet will barely touch the ground before the end of the year, as he’s off doing the BBC music awards and Jingle Bell Ball this month. “I have to be able to pay for my recording gear somehow!” he laughs.
