Say „Burl" and you think of a transformer placed exactly where a "proper" converter designer would never put one — and the uproar that idea caused in the industry. The company was founded in 2006 in the Santa Cruz mountains of California by Rich Williams, an engineer who, before entering audio, designed video compression in Silicon Valley, hated the job, went to recording school, and landed at Universal Audio, where he designed the well-regarded 2192 converter. When UA decided to head toward a cheaper, mass-market segment (the Apollo interfaces) instead of developing the high-end multichannel converter Williams wanted, he left to start his own company — initially operating literally out of Paradise Recording, the studio where he worked day to day.
The decision that would define the brand for years to come was putting a transformer on the input stage of an A/D converter — something "proper" converter designers avoided, treating it as a source of distortion. Williams spent months soldering, tuning transistors, and listening, until he landed on what he calls „soul power" — the warmth and character of analog gear that purely digital converters were missing. The result was the B2 Bomber ADC/DAC, and in 2011, the flagship modular B80 Mothership — a card-based converter chassis handling up to 80 channels of conversion and supporting Dante, MADI, and SoundGrid protocols, now found in studios recording artists like Chris Stapleton, The Black Keys, and Foo Fighters.
At Wired Tunes we carry the full Burl Audio lineup — from the compact B2 Bomber converters, to the modular Mothership systems (B16, B80), to the B1/B1D mic preamps and the BC5000 Bigfoot optical compressor. It's gear for engineers who believe digital conversion doesn't have to sound sterile — and who want their recordings to have something more than just correct numbers behind them.
