Say „Metric Halo" and you think of a company born out of not having enough money, not out of a business plan. The story starts in the mid-1990s in Poughkeepsie, New York, where brothers B.J. and Joe Buchalter, tired of paying by the hour at other people's recording studios, built their own — above a bagel bakery owned by their father, Stu. When it came time to verify the room's acoustics, they discovered the proper test gear would cost more than the entire studio itself. So B.J. decided to just write his own measurement software instead — and that's how SpectraFoo was born, today one of the most respected metering suites in the audio industry. The name „Metric Halo" itself was originally a proposed name for Joe's band, deemed too weak, and was recycled first as a record label, then as the hardware company.

The real breakthrough came in 2001 with the Mobile I/O 2882 — one of the first FireWire audio interfaces designed for the Macintosh. Since then, Metric Halo has stuck to an unusual philosophy of „future-proof" hardware: rather than force customers to buy a new interface every few years, the company designs its converters (today's flagship ULN-8 mkIV and LIO-8 modules) to accept hardware upgrades — its „2d" and „3d" generations are real jumps in DSP power and connectivity delivered to the same box you already bought.

At Wired Tunes we carry the full Metric Halo interface lineup along with its well-regarded plugins (ChannelStrip, HaloVerb, Multiband Dynamics), including a faithful model of the legendary MCI console from Criteria Studios (where the Eagles and Eric Clapton recorded). It's gear for engineers who want to buy a converter once a decade, not once every two years — and who appreciate a company that measures what it sells.