A to D then D to A then back again! Help!

G

Gunther

New member
Ok, I have been reading that every d/a and a/d conversion costs pretty big in sound quality… so in planning my soon to be purchased setup I am wondering if my thinking is flawed since it involves 4! conversions.

First from mic or keyboard to .wav file in cakewalk… then from digital to analog during the mix down, where it goes to my mixer and I add in my hardware effects, eq, compression and all… and ultimately back to cakewalk to end up as a stereo .wav… then it goes to CD or MP3 to be decoded to analog yet again by the listener.

Will all this A to D to A kill the sound?

Makes me think that getting a soundcard with really solid D / A converters is really important.
 
I think you have answered your own question. With good convertors it's not that big of an issue. With crappy convertors it's a matter of what sounds best. Leaving them digital and mixing that way or adding all the analog mixing and processing. Use your ears to decide what is the best route for you.
 
I'm a little confused, which is nothing new, but you say you're going to be mixing on an analog mixer, and that you're gonna get all the tracks to and from the mixer with a Delta 66 (which incidently I own)? So, does that mean you're only mixing 4 tracks?

As far as the converter quality on the Delta 66, any sonic degradation from one extra set of conversions is gonna be hard to hear except by trained ears on quality monitors. Just make sure you use the full bit depth during the initial recording, and on the subsequent transfers to and from the mixer. Of course, once the music hits the mixer, that's a whole other can o worms, and there's plenty you can do there to screw up your noise floor and dynamic range, but the fact that you're wanting to mix externally probably means you are familiar with the analog domain.

Regards, RD
 
I thought the delta66 could handle 6 tracks.

Anyway I use a lot of keyboards, so the input to the mixer during mix down would be 6 audio channels from cakewalk and 4 - 6 audio channels from my keyboards which would be played by however many midi tracks I need...

The thing is, clarity on the vocals is very important to me, and I don’t want to lose that in my a/d/a/d conversion.
 
Hold up.. what kind of 'killer' hardware effects are you using?

If you say a berry autocom pro and a nanoverb.........

xoxo
 
Wow... your right it is 4 channels. Ill probably only use 2 - 4 chans, so the delta 44 makes more sense for me.

Camn: The effects are from Lexicon and roland... but the mixer is a Behringer :)

I suppose I could avoid the d/a conversion and mix in the diital world... I do it with the midi tracks anyway, but I kinda like working with a real board and hardware effects in the final mixdown.
 
I thought the same way for awhile, I kept using my Yamaha MD4S (minidisk portastudio thingy) because I liked the faders and knobs. I think that unless you have killer outboard gear (especially the mixer) you'll be better off doing everything inside your PC. The plug-ins from Waves are pretty darn good. I think you'll get used to mixing inside your PC. Another great thing is that you can save all your mix settings and instantly go back to them just by pulling up the song file in your software.
Good luck!

Gunther said:
<snip>but I kinda like working with a real board and hardware effects in the final mixdown.
Click to expand...
 
Another thing you can do is to get a control surface, which gives you faders and knobs to tweak, but it's controlling the software mixer, with no audio actually passing through it. When I gave up my MDM's and digital mixer to go with Samplitude, I thought I would hate mouse mixing. I ended up not hating it at all, though I am going to get a Mackie Control soon. I do miss the motorized flying faders. Dual monitors are a great thing, with your track view on one screen, and mixer on the other. I run dual 19"s, and love it. Software effects have come a long way as computer speeds have given the designers more bandwidth to write better algorithms. The big advantage that plugins have over hardware effects is the ability to run multiple instances, so if you have one good software reverb, you have a whole rack full of them....as many as you computer has the MIPs to run. This is really handy with compressors, which are usually inserted one per track rather than on a buss serving several tracks. Really, I couldn't see going back to external mixing unless it was on a really nice (expensive) console, and I had a second boatload of money to buy a truckload of outboard.
Regards, RD
 
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