If money was no object (well, sort of...)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Armistice
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Armistice

Armistice

Son of Yoda
Indulge me...

You have yer new mega fast 100GB RAM pc with multiple 25TB hard drives spinning at 20,000 RMP and 5 big screen monitors, and three sets of studio quality monitors and a solid gold control surface and the bestest DAW software ever with features they haven't even invented yet....

You have all the microphones, guitars, keyboards etc. that you'll ever need.

You are recording at home in a large untreated room and won't be moving to a studio or treating the room any time soon - a limitation on the quality of sound, perhaps, but you've been doing this awhile and you know how to get the best out of it. You do not record anything particularly loud but have a separate room for amped electric guitars. Singing is involved. Acoustic instruments are involved.

You have no need of more than 4 inputs, now or in the future.

What would YOU choose to bridge the gap between microphone and DAW, bearing the info/limitations above in mind, if money wasn't particularly a concern?

Curious...

I'll probably have to go this route sometime soon and thought I'd approach it from the opposite direction of "I have $X to spend, what's my best option?" that we usually see here.:)
 
I'd probably just invest in a snake or one of those xlr wall boxes that you can mount in a wall. The wall mount would probably be the most expensive, but the cleanest. Having a 100ft snake would probably be the most practical for most people. Don't think most land lords would like the idea of cutting into the wall to mount one:rolleyes:. If you own your own place...cut away
 
Talk about opening Pandora's box! Space, for me, would be priority no.1, since I just have a bedroom with average sound isolation. I would also invest in top quality instruments - probably a high-end Taylor acoustic and a Les Paul straight of the bat - but also delve into a range of different instruments (plus mics and amps) to really explore what I liked. I'd probably keep things in the box, since I prefer that at present.

Plenty of other ideas...
 
Man, with all that fancy jive, I`d throw a behringer something inbetween so atleast I`d have something to blame when my recordings still came out like shit....LOL..

sorry, just could`nt resist..LOL
 
Two quote I heard years ago spring to mind:

"The room is 80% of your sound." (or "There's a REASON big studios spend million$ to build studios...)

and

"All those Top40 hits before 1990 were made on equipment you'd laugh at now. Your problem may not be your fancy hardware..."
 
Perhaps I'm being too obscure...

Let's say I have world class instruments and microphones and know how to get the best out of the room, and a world class DAW/PC - the bit in the middle (no, not the leads) to covert my analogue signal and feed it digitally into the PC is what I'm talking about.

Interface / analogue preamp and AD/DA converters - what would you do?

Cheers
 
Unless you have a bazillion-dollar room, go to a music retailer site and buy whatever your budget allows for the number of channels you need. You obviously want someone to hold your hand buying a soundcard/interface. You have to do some research yourself and not have someone spoon-feed you a reccomendation that may not be right for you....
 
Not even slightly useful but,

If money was no object I'd be tracking to tape.
 
Hi,

I did have a fairly open ended budget and I bought one of these:

images


An Mbox 3 Pro with plenty of inputs for now and a bit spare for later. Came with Pro Tools 10 and some useful plug-ins (all of which I wanted, especially PT 10). Pre-amps that have been favourably reviewed in their price range and are well good enough for now. No doubt there are many better ones, and there are certainly plenty worse, but it seems like a comfortable match for the rest of my gear and my current level of skills and knowledge (both at playing and recording). I don't believe in being too tight-arsed and not leaving any headroom for growth, but on the other hand there's not a lot of point in buying gear that's too far out of your own league and that you're unlikely to get the benefit from (either because you can't appreciate the extra quality, or because something else in the chain hobbles it, or because you never quite master how to get the best out of it).

It may be the last one I need to buy, or I may upgrade again further down the track - but only if and when I know WHY. If I haven't hit an identifiable limitation on its performance and/or I can't actually hear something that I especially want to improve, then it can keep doing the job.

Good luck choosing one for yourself.

Chris
 
Well, given the rather artificial constraints, I'd buy one of THESE. MOTU tend to be the "go to" interface for the professionals I know well--on a basis of sound quality and reliability.

However, the reality is that I probably wouldn't start from where you want me to.

I'd have a high quality (Studer/Digidesign/A&H etc.) digital mixer with an appropriate interface to feed directly from that into the computer. If room treatment wasn't an option, I'd invest in moveable/store flat acoustic screens I could put where needed for whatever I was doing. And I'd probably use a PYRAMIX DAW--preferably the hardware version but I'd have a look at the software only stuff if I had your supercomputer. I've only used Pyramix once but it was love at first mix.
 
TimOBrien said:
Unless you have a bazillion-dollar room, go to a music retailer site and buy whatever your budget allows for the number of channels you need. You obviously want someone to hold your hand buying a soundcard/interface. You have to do some research yourself and not have someone spoon-feed you a reccomendation that may not be right for you....
Click to expand...

LOL Tim - perhaps read the pedigree before commenting :laughings: - not everyone posting a question in the noobs forum is a complete noob - they just have a question, perhaps, about an area that's noob to them

I've been here longer than you, sunshine and made several albums along the way. :)

Given that I currently use reasonable standalone preamps that cost (past tense, perhaps) more than most of the interfaces that people recommend around here and I'm going to switch from standalone to PC recording at some stage in the medium term depending upon how frustrating dealing with my standalone gets, and whether it actually dies (which seems likely), instead of saying "I have $100/$500/$5000 what sort of interface should I get?" I'm saying, if budget wasn't particularly a concern, what would you do?

I'll keep my pres, obviously, but they're analogue, no digital conversion, and but I can't run monitors from them, so an interface of some sort I'll need...

But thanks fer droppin' by.:cool:
 
Bobbsy said:
Well, given the rather artificial constraints, I'd buy one of THESE. MOTU tend to be the "go to" interface for the professionals I know well--on a basis of sound quality and reliability.

However, the reality is that I probably wouldn't start from where you want me to.

I'd have a high quality (Studer/Digidesign/A&H etc.) digital mixer with an appropriate interface to feed directly from that into the computer. If room treatment wasn't an option, I'd invest in moveable/store flat acoustic screens I could put where needed for whatever I was doing. And I'd probably use a PYRAMIX DAW--preferably the hardware version but I'd have a look at the software only stuff if I had your supercomputer. I've only used Pyramix once but it was love at first mix.
Click to expand...

Thanks Bobbsy - food for thought there. Cheers!:drunk:
 
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