Stand alone CDR questions

James HE

a spoonfull weighs a ton
Doc's set up for live recording inspired me to think about getting a CDR. But I have a few questions on how this could actually work for me. On the demo I'm working on now, I ended up dumping the 1 track of drums and 1 track of bass from my cassetee 4-track into cakewalk, and then doing the guitars and vocals myself. So it would make sense to record a submix of drums into CDR on the left and the bass track on the right and do the same, and have better quality. How exactly? Could I just put the CD into the CD rom and do it that way? or run a digital out from the burner into the computer?

Also I'd like the ability to do both CDR and CDRW- are the Phillips machines the only ones that do this? I'm sketchy about the tecnology involved here. I'm thinking I'd want 24bit over 16bit for more headroom and stuff, but a CD burnt at 24bits would'nt play on a regular player right?? even if it's not CDRW? Or is that just solely the A/D conversion and dosen't effect the disc itself? And exactly how much better would the quality of 24bits over 16 be?

I don't want a machine that is strictly CDRW cause I want to make copies for people. But I do want CDRW cause I want to use it for mixing and I don't want the pressure of wasting a disk when i do a mix. But then again if if I did mix to CDRW I would'nt be able to burn a copy of it anyway caus only my recorder could read it!! :confused:

The Phillips burner seems like it would suit me well, but would it perform well for recording live from a mixer?

Any help would be groovy-

-jhe
 
James, for the same price of most stand alone units, you could buy a Lynx One 24 bit audio card and a CD burner for your computer.

Is 24 bit really better? Fudge yes!!! (can't swear on here damnit!!!)

Here is the deal (I am giving away trade secrets, now I gotta kill anyone that reads this, so if you don't want to die, don't read this... :D )

You record your mixes, or, dump some tracks from your multitrack to the computer at 24 bits/48KHz sampling rate. Do what you need to do with it there, mix, edit, process, whatever.

Then, (hear is the secret I am "giving" away... :D) you sample it down with the best sample rate converter your software has. Then you dither it with the best dithering algorythm your software has. Then you save it as a 16 bit file. Preto!!! You are now the proud owner of a better than 16 bit .wav file, but the kicker is that it is only 16 bit!

How many times to I need to say it. Start out with the best quality, maintain the best quality as long as possible, then step it down if need be. This will produce the best results.

Dude, since I have started mixing to my hard drive using 24 bit converters, my mixes have came out much better. The dithering and sampling down certainly takes away from some of the initial fidelity gains, but, the mixes sound much better than if I started out mixing them to a 16 bit converter.

In the case of using a Lynx One sound card, well, it is a very high quality card. The independent tech bench test's have shown that this card is thouroughly a very professional card with extremely high quality A/D/A converters on it. Low noise, versatile, and a decent price.

You may find yourself just wanting to skip the whole 4 track cassette thing altogether with using this card. I can assure you that the sound will be much more detailed (actually a detriment for sloppy musicianship, THAT is why a lot of musicians hate digital, it does not cover their mistakes with noise.... :D), much better frequency response, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more headroom.

Why mess with the lowest quality analog medium there is (cassette) and then send that audio to the lowest quality digital their is (16 bit converters) when you can be working in the 24 bit realm? This just doesn't make any sense at all to me.

Also, if you had a CD burner on the computer, you can back up your original tracks from the hard drive as 24 bit files by authoring a DATA CD instead of a Music CD. The project I just finished was backed up to CD Rom via my burner. This is a precaution I HAVE to take when people are paying me. It is not like I was anywhere close to running out of harddrive space. I have over 15 GB available for storage, and I only used like a little under 4GB for the whole project. That was 9 songs, 54 mins. of audio total, 24 bit/48KHz sampling rate with the start end edits, the processed 24/48 files, the 24/44.1 files, the 16/44.1 files, and 192kbs mp3's altogether. So you can see that you don't really need a whole lot of storage to work with your music. I mean 4 GB is a lot of storage, but, I could dump the original mixes off of the hard drive right after the start and end edits. I could back up the start and end edit files to CDR, I could back up the processed mixes to CD, I can backup the 24/44.1 mixes to CD, etc....So you see, you can easily manage your audio files even if they are 24 bit with an internal CDR/W drive on your computer, plus, you get the benefits of 24 bit audio. How do you lose in this case?

Hey, if it was that important to record live, it is not unprecedented to bring the computer along to record. You just have to be carefull during transport. Big deal. You are still going to get the benefits of 24 bit audio.

The only way you can even doubt any of this is if you haven't heard 24 bit audio before and compared it to 16 bit. One listen to 24 bit and there is no going back my friend. I haven't used my nice Fostex DAT recorded since I got my Lynx One card except to transfer a few mixes that where only on DAT tape to my hard drive via the digital inputs on the Lynx card. My nice Marantz stand alone CD burner/player is now a fancy CD playback device in the studio because it is actually faster for me to burn CD from the hard drive to my computers CDR/W because it burns at 4X speed. I sort of use the Marantz to hear stuff on the computer at 16 bits via the digital I/O's on both devices, but this is just a quick reference thing. The 16 bit converters just cloud up the sound too much to do any serious decision making on it.

So forget about paying $600 + on a stand alone. Buy a 24 bit soundcard and a CDR/W for your computer at the same price and really step up your audio. You will thank me for telling you this..... :D

A concerned audioist.

Ed
 
Well Ed, that sounds good to me. The problem here is that It's not even my computer that I'm using!! So I can't take it anywhere or even think about getting a good card!! When I move out of my current place of residence in August I will be in the same boat with S8-N until I can get my own computer. (Around July exspect a LOT of questions from me about setups cause I don't know jack!) I'm always looking for a nice middle step before then to help me along and I figured the stand alone would always come in handy- especially for the portability factors. Of course there's a LOT of other stuff I need too like a board and some more mics and... hmmm... man I should probably just save and save for the computer, but the lure of new shiny stuff is so strong... I guess I'll just have to win the lottery or something!

-jhe
 
If you do want a stand alone unit consider the TASCAM CDRW-5000. They are $699.00 now. I've been using one for over a year now.

16 bit 44.1 khz recording to CDR or CDRW from any digital or analog source. CD's are playable on any CD player. No SCMS chip so you can make unlimited digital copies of what you record.

It's plug and record in real time so you can't beat the ease of use.



[This message has been edited by hixmix (edited 03-27-2000).]
 
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