Le Mobile: X-Series Converters
Posted on: December 2, 2008
Posted in: Products, Video, X-Series
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Guy Charbonneau of Le Mobile describes why he is the owner of one the largest collections of Apogee X-Series converters in the world. Specializing in remote recording, Le Mobile has been the truck of choice for the music industries biggest performers including U2, John Mayer, The Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and many more.
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AD-16X & DA-16X
“Hi I am Guy Charbonneau, and you are sitting inside of Le Mobile. I have been sitting in this truck for over 30 years now. It’s unbelievable and we are still doing music. One thing Le Mobile will probably never leave the truck is the good old Neve. There is something about the Neve that you can not describe, it’s musical and has a sound. Over the years, Neve and Studer was my machine of choice, Studer 800 as the analog machine at one point I switched with Dolby -SR which I thought sounded great, It’s very musical. I never tried to have a tape machine changing the sound for me. It was capture what the Neve does, when I play it back I want it to sound the same.”
For many years it was straight analog, from time to time go with a digital machine, 48 track. And kind of fight, I didn’t feel proper with these digital machines, They were not sounding analog, they were not sounding like the Neve sound.
“One day Studer came and loaned me a Studer machine for a Circus De Soilel project, I worked for a week with that machine and at the end of the week I said I need to buy two machines. Now we were switching depending on the project between analog and digital machine and about 4 or 5 years ago tape starts to go away, and ever time we need to make a Pro Tools session, we did have a Pro Tools for mixing and editing, but it was just an 8 channel Pro Tools, and at that time I had an Apogee 8000 converter with my Pro Tools and we liked the way it sounded, it sounded like the Studer machine for me, and was sounding like music to me.”
“ We were editing using this machine, bouncing between the studer machine and the Pro-Tools at that time and tuning or fixing stuff and then going back to tape machine. When it came time to build a full system because now it’s time to get a full 48 track of pro-tools, we installed pro tools by the digidesign system and we did some A/B tests and I said “ something is wrong here , it is like putting glass in front of the sound of what I am used to, so the first thing we did with that system is we said Let’s at least try a better clock because the clock in the Studer machine was great and made the clock sound very nice, and analog in a sense in their sound. So we put a Big Ben clock to the Pro- Tools and it was already a serious improvement, but we were still not there yet. So, I went to a Namm show and I saw Dave from Apogee showing these converters, I said We like our 8000, could we borrow an AD and DA 16 to do some tests, and I got stuck I ended up buying 192 of these I/O’s and more than that because I built another system after that with 48 more channels and that’s the history on how we ended up with the Apogee converters.”
“ “It gave me back what the Neve console gave me, for me that’s the important thing. What I capture. I record, and play it back, it’s the same. And that is what I want. And I don’t want it to sound different or brighter or darker, and the dimension is probably the hardest thing for converters. A lot of them could sound good frequency wise but you miss that depth and of course not every pre-amp will show you that difference but with the neve, we have some Grace pre amps and Millennia pre amps as well.and apogee, it’s the combination of what I use and it just works, what I record what I capture what I playback, that’s what it is.