Ok... I took the plunge

[Velvet Elvis]

Well... I finally did it. I found an offer I couldn't refuse for the purchase of a new HD-24... so...

This past week I ordered a brand new HD-24 and two custom built 24 channel snakes from the wonderful people at Gepco to connect it up to my studio.

Gonna drop by the local computer mart and buy a pair of 40 or 80GB hard drives (one for use, one for backup)... and see how it all goes.

That now bumps the studio up to 48 tracks of ADAT (24 tape based and 24 HD based) as well as additional computer tracks if I were to ever need them.

I can't wait to see how this thing sounds compared to my black face ADATs.

Velvet Elvis

[Track Rat]

Welcome to the club. There's a handfull of us here who've stepped off and picked one up. I don't think you'll be sorry. I'm not, that's for sure.

[Velvet Elvis]

Track Rat...

I hope your right...

The deciding factor was that I have a project that has to be in to a record company by end of July... and I'm getting tired of loading indexes etc off tape

Figured... get one of these... copy all my tapes to the drive... make sure to consistently back up the drive (right Blue Bear?)
and go to town.

I'm guessing I'll notice some nice sonic quality improvements between using the 16bit ADATs and the 24bit HD24.

Velvet Elvis

[Track Rat]

Oh Baby! I think you'll hear a difference between the Black face ADAT 16 bit converters and the new 24 bit ones in the HD24.

[Velvet Elvis]

well... I must admit... this is a nice product.

I got mine on Friday (after purchasing two 40GB drives for it) and wired it all up....

I *did* have one issue transferring tracks from my black face adats to the HD24... I was controlling all of them with the BRC and for some reason tracks 9 through 16 and 17 through 24 on the HD24 would pop every so often... all 8 tracks at a time... Finally, after buying new fiber optic cables... which wasn't the issue... I tried pulling the HD24 out of the BRC chain (so that I could then switch its digital time clock over to OPTICAL rather than ADAT which is what it defaults to if it is sync'd to other ADATs or a BRC) and everything seemed to go just fine. Not really sure what happened with the connection otherwise.

Any ideas?

Sonic quality is very nice... and the tracking... wow... much easier. Fixing all those little punch in's etc is soooooo easy when you don't have to wait for the tape to rewind and the other decks to sync up.

I also FTP'd a song over to Samplitude and Cakewalk, just to see what would happen.... it worked beautifully as well. So now I can edit files etc on my laptop while wondering around

Unlike Q however, I think I will hang on to my three black face adats for a while... They've been very good to me.

Very nice.

Velvet Elvis

[MISTERQCUE]

Welcome to our world home-boy!!! So far I'm still in the 1st grade on this thingy and have recorded all of 2 WHOLE SONGS on it!!!
I haven't used it for the past few weeks as I'm been working on the house, but will try to get back at it this weekend!

[Velvet Elvis]

Q,

Hey man... I'm further along than you ;-) I've done 5 or 6 songs on it now... man what a difference. I've got an album due in July of 13 songs. I've been storing songs about 4 or 5 per set of ADAT tapes prior to this. That meant tons of loading and unloading table of contents from tapes... hours of backups etc...

Now they are all being transferred to the HD24. I can call ANY of the 13 up in seconds, and backup to the second drive bay in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes.

Pretty cool.

Velvet Elvis