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Recording Equipment


Shuriken
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34 members have voted

  1. 1. Recording Equipment, what do you guys use?

    • Firewire
    • USB
    • PCI/PCI-e/PCMCIA card
    • Onboard Soundcard
    • Standalone Multitrack Recorder


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I use a T.C. Electronic Konnekt 24D. I'm very pleased with the box, great pre-amps, nice DSP effects (reverb / channelstrip), can run without the computer as a mixer with the DSP effects (with limited control). But with only 4 analog in and out I will probably be expanding it with an 8x8 ADAT interface in the future. Coming from an M-audio USB Audiophile with small Phonic mixer the sound in recordings has improved a lot, but I think driver-stability could be improved on the Konnekt 24D. I believe T.C. has that sorted in their newer firewire interfaces though.

When looking at a high quality firewire option, the MOTU 828mk3 might be an attractive alternative to my (future) combination of Konnekt 24D (or Impact Twin) + ADAT expansion.

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A question of pure interest - does Mac OS allow hibernating from within e.g. Ableton, with a full reconnect of audio-drivers when waking up? Like switching on the laptop and being able to press "record" directly afterwards without the necessity to restart the DAW? This then would be indeed a very nice upgrade path. (In my windows 7 environment, the crappy m-audio drivers very often refuse to work after "suspend from disk", a reboot is necessary).

I can confirm that Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 can sleep (like "standby", not like "hibernate") with Logic or Ableton Live running, and then wake up and immediately continue outputting through my MOTU 828 mkII (Firewire), and my Korg Zero 8 (Firewire).

I used to not be very confident in its ability to do this, but now I just take it for granted. Probably comes as a result of Apple's unparalleled "Core Audio" technology, which allows it to consistently trounce the other operating systems in terms of stability and latency.

Edited by nebula
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I can confirm that Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 can sleep (like "standby", not like "hibernate") with Logic or Ableton Live running, and then wake up and immediately continue outputting through my MOTU 828 mkII (Firewire), and my Korg Zero 8 (Firewire).

That is indeed very nice then! Thanks a lot for the feedback, it is now clear what brand my next laptop will be :-)

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Good to see the large amount of reaction. Thanks for that guys.

The topic offeres no clear answer but that was to be expected as there are so many people with so many different needs. It did however give me some insight in which direction to move. Will keep you updated on what i will buy.

Edited by Shuriken
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I recently got a Presonus FireStudio Projects. Im glad i went for the 8in 8out rather than something smaller.

it also has a stand alone mode where you can use it with out a computer, but you need the computer to set up the different mixes.

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I recently got a Presonus FireStudio Projects. Im glad i went for the 8in 8out rather than something smaller.

it also has a stand alone mode where you can use it with out a computer, but you need the computer to set up the different mixes.

Mine is the same, but it's just a cheap copy... i'm so happy with the 8 I/Os too. I can easily get by using software eq... maybe that's bad, dunno. Works fantastic for me.

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Aw, please.... come on!

In fact a wellknown musicsoftware developer just had a huge webserver breakdown because of a recent update. 80% of the followers began bitching about Windows platform... until the dev himself responded that the webserver actually is running Linux!!111

My guess is, that if ppl had better understanding about computers, they wouldn't get into problems that often.. and that's a general statement, regardless of OS, hardware, everything. I can't build a house f.ex... but that doesn't mean that i should think 'bricks are bad' :D

Anyways, this thread is about recording equipment, and i use computers for recording all the time. In fact a lot of huge studios uses computers too, to make multimilliondollar hits. Tons of worldtouring international artists has half the stage full of computer rigs - I'm sure they would use hardware-only if it yielded better results :)

Sorry for derailing the debate :flowers: back to soundcards and mixers

Hehe, well, I was merely pointing at the fact that forced reboots for forced updates out of the user's control are a bad thing and shouldn't happen at all.

Updates can always go wrong, on every OS. The thing is, with Windows, I have to dig deep in order to keep it from auto-updating in the mid of doing important work.

Show me any Linux or OS X or other Unix that does that? They nicely ask if you want to update right now, if anything. The whole process is under your control.

Now back to mixers and interfaces :)

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The thing is, with Windows, I have to dig deep in order to keep it from auto-updating in the mid of doing important work.

Control Panel -> Windows Update -> Change Settings

Select 'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them'

It's 4 mouseclicks, 5 if you count the click on the 'start' button - to me, it's not an overwhealming task, no :ninja: skills needed, but i can't speak for everyone ofcourse. But it kinda proves my point that if ppl had better understanding about computers in general, they wouldn't get into :frantics: that often

Edited by Flemming
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The problem with Windows is that none of that stuff is where you expect it to be. You say 4-5 mouse clicks ... is that before or after you've switched your start menu into something logical, and is that before or after you've changed your control panel to "classic view?"

And are you talking about Win 7 or XP? Because they're VERY different.

And can you even adjust that before you've fixed the "security center"?

I have a pretty good understanding of "computers in general", but that's no reason to accept a crappy UI. I find that with Windows you have to hunt around for settings like that, while on the Mac (which is also not perfect), most of that type of stuff is where you expect it to be. It's a big deal when you want to get down to your work.

Also on Windows there are too many settings that change the fundamental ways you interact with your computer. Control panel views, taskbar grouping and locking, system tray size (and the icons it arbitrarily hides), menu bar views (where did they go?), optional installs... every die-hard Windows user I know has a half-hour routine of configuring a new Windows installation to their way of working, because out of the box it sucks.

All these options are great for somebody who enjoys tweaking their computer, but for me that has become old. I just want to sit down and create.

Anyway... oops ... broke open the holy war again. Somebody punch me. I know it's not on purpose, but saying "if ppl had better understanding about computers in general" is kind of a troll that I just fed right into. :logik:

Edited by nebula
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Anyway... oops ... broke open the holy war again. Somebody punch me. I know it's not on purpose, but saying "if ppl had better understanding about computers in general" is kind of a troll that I just fed right into. :logik:

Troll?? Well, i wasn't on about different OSes or anything, hence the 'in general', but i understand that a few of you wants to take this towards the OS war :)

I'm happy for you that you found a nice OS to work on, regardless of which! But i'm not talking crap about either Unix, iOS, OSX, Linux or any other OS at all. You do ;) Calling Windows crappy, bad gui and what not - And to me, that's trolling! I can't see how windows would suck, just because it has tons of features and can be configured to suit everyones personal needs?? Let's take some other software as example - is 'MS Paint' better than Photoshop, since Photoshop has so many features, menus and gui settings? I just pointed out that Windows is not that scary as many ppl wants it to be. And that everything is a few clicks away, easy peasy :)

But i can say this much:

- the 4-5 clicks are pretty much the same in both XP, Vista and 7. And they have nothing to do with the security center (which in 7 is called 'action center' btw).

- If you miss the menu bar, try pressing 'Alt' button while you have a window open.

- All your windows settings can even be easily saved, and transfered to another windows machine in a jiff. All ready to create again. No need for 30mins of settings-hunting. This works also from Vista to 7 (called an 'upgrade'). A bit trickier from XP to 7 though (called a 'migration').

Again, i can agree i was trolling if i was dissing OSX, Linux or whatever - I didn't! I just said that Windows is really not that hard. On top of that, i can't see why it's bad for you that I like Windows? If you work best on another system, then you just avoid Windows, but there is no need to call it crappy, just because you can't make it behave - It's all in the manual, like with any other piece of software.

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  • 3 weeks later...

And on-topic again :ahappy:

I bought a Fostex VF-160 on ebay a couple of days ago. It's a digital recording desk with harddisk and cdr. It can record 16 channels. However to get to 16 channels you will need to get something like an ADA8000.

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  • 1 month later...

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Recording... My favourite recorder at the time is Tascam 238 cassette 8-track. Really really good for recording line sources.

My mixer is fancy tubepreamp TL-Audio that have given me so much headache, but now works really nice. It has dedicate firewire interface for all 12 preamps and integrates a computer really nicely to my analog studio.

I have spent thousands on the equipment and finally prefer a 100$ Tascam, cassette and old behringer mixer :D

Its not the equipment really ... The cassette is, as Nils stated, 1000x better than booting computers and cursing with HD space. 20 minutes of 8-track recording with normal cassette (I don't even prefer metal etc cassettes) and the system is runnin as soon as you hit the power button.

The TL-audio mixer is quite nice, but way too big. I was also after a&h mixer that was shown in previous posts, but for some reason paid 3x the sum and got this.

Next big investment was a few really good mics ... I don't prefer line sources always and have some really nice Hohner keyboard amps to drive guitars, bass and synths... Recommended - these suckers cost less than 200e at your local Ebay. 30e postage to Finland :D

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Makes a difference compared to what a daw can make to the sound.

Let it bleed :D

Edited by Nestle
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