Help me spend 3500 dollars!

A

andres

New member
There is a chance I get a fellowship after college that will pay me a significant amount of money to do a spoken-word/interviewing project. I need to get a portable recording setup.

1 rugged omni (thinking Electrovoice RE50)
1 rugged cardiod (thinking sennheiser E855)
A nice digital, portable preamp (maybe a Lunatec V3?)

What do I record it into? and how much would it cost?
DAT? Minidisk? Some harddrive contraption? Should I stick with dynamics in the field -- most of it will be handheld recording, does that eliminate nice condensers from consideration?

The 3500 dollars will also be stretched to get Apple Logic Express (students can get it for 150), a usb2 harddrive for my PowerBook, some RAM, mic cords, battery packs, etc.

All you field recorders out there -- give this thread some love!
 
i dont know if this might interest you , but an amd 64 laptop computer might interest you. far more processing power than a powerbook.
with a good fast internal hard drive at 7200 rpm youll have something that lasts for a long time.
the software i use is powertracks from pgmusic.com. far more facilities
than logic express and less expensive. just try the demo sometime. you can read the introductory video and customer reviews at the site.
if you have q's - ask. i'm a long time user, and also a computer engineer.peace.
 
If it's a Powerbook, don't go USB2: go FireWire.

FireWire is faster than USB2, and Powerbooks DON'T have USB2 ports, only USB1 (which are abysmally slow, I might add). Most external harddrives have BOTH USB2 and Firewire inputs, anyway.
 
Well, I looked at the specs on my notebook and it has two USB2 connections and one FireWire. I could daisy chain a couple firewire devices, I guess.

What I am really looking for, though, is just something I can put in a small bag on my shoulder while I carry a microphone. Let's forget the computer stuff for a sec...

A Grace Lunatec V3 could output 24/96 audio through its digital out, but what would record the audio? What device has an 24/96 s/pdif input and a little harddrive. The Edirol R-4 is nice, but I wanted to get a separate preamp I could forseeably use in other applications (the Grace), so is there anything out there with an spdif input and harddrive for $1k or less?

I am interviewing random people in random places -- no guarantee I will have a little table to lay my laptop down (if that were the case I would just use my computer and Firewire Solo).

Ideas?
 
Rent as much of the gear as you can. Put the extra money in the bank. Buy only the core products you need to go forward.
 
Phobophile said:
If it's a Powerbook, don't go USB2: go FireWire.

FireWire is faster than USB2, and Powerbooks DON'T have USB2 ports, only USB1 (which are abysmally slow, I might add). Most external harddrives have BOTH USB2 and Firewire inputs, anyway.
Click to expand...



PowerBooks do have USB2, and USB2 is actually faster than Firewire 400 (USB2 is 480). Firewire 800 is faster yes, but there is only one Firewire jack on the laptop and I would suggest using that for the HD. If he was only recording in stereo or mono (one or two tracks at a time), USB2 would be plenty fast enough.




But since you can't bring your laptop, have you considered something like this: http://www.marantzpro.com/Products/PMD650.html

It's pretty reliable (I used an older model for interviewing for my college newspaper), and I think it's pretty inexpensive too. That way you could spend the rest of you money on other cool stuff.
 
OneRoomStudios said:
Firewire 800 is faster yes, but there is only one Firewire jack on the laptop and I would suggest using that for the HD. If he was only recording in stereo or mono (one or two tracks at a time), USB2 would be plenty fast enough.
Click to expand...
If I was to record only one or two channels I wouldn't bother about an external hard drive. I recorded 4 tracks (24/44.1) simultaneously on my laptop (with stock 4500rpm hard drive) a few weeks ago through my new firewire interface and I think I haven't even started pushing the whole setup yet.
 
But it's always a good idea to keep your audio seperate incase of crashes, etc. it would suck to loose all of your interviews because of a virus.
 
Separate partitions on one hard drive will take you a long way. That's what I do.

Adding more hard drives to the equation doesn't make your projects less prone to hard drive crashes.
Two hard drives = double the chance of a crash.
 
christiaan said:
Two hard drives = double the chance of a crash.
Click to expand...


Not exactly. Two hard drives = double the chance of one hard drive crashing, but half the chance of the hardrive with your music on it crashing. And if the hard drive fails mechanically, no amount of partitioning will save the data.


Sorry if I hijacked the thread btw..
 
I will never store anything critical on a partition as I have seen way too many partitions fail over the years. The Apogee mini me would be a great way of getting some preamps and converters to start with. Also, even USB 1 should have no problem keeping up with only 4 tracks of audio.
 
OneRoomStudios said:
Not exactly. Two hard drives = double the chance of one hard drive crashing, but half the chance of the hardrive with your music on it crashing.
Click to expand...
Well, what's half of double?
So there is no security gain in adding an extra hard drive.
 
christiaan said:
Well, what's half of double?
So there is no security gain in adding an extra hard drive.
Click to expand...
For security reasons I have back-up hard drives that I put in the vault at the end of each session.
 
DJL said:
For security reasons I have back-up hard drives that I put in the vault at the end of each session.
Click to expand...
Now that makes a lot more sense.
Even though a hard drive isn't what anyone would call a true backup medium, the redundancy from having multiple copies will get you a long way.
 
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