16 ch. at 24-bit, 96k ProTools rig for about $2k. :D

NeveSSL

NeveSSL

New member
Hi all!

Just had a great idea for when I finally get out off college and get a job. :D

I'm thinking about getting an M-Audio Lightbridge and feeding with an Apogee AD-16 (the discontinued one... about $1500 used on eBay) feeding ProTools M-Powered. Using S/MUX on between the Lightbridge and AD-16 you can have 16 simultaneous inputs at 24-bit, 96k. :cool:

The only immediate downside is that the Lightbridge only has two outputs on it. While tracking, you would have to use these two for cues (IE, no dedicated control room mix). Or you could just get a DigimaxFS for 4 stereo cues and save the Lightbridge outs for yourself. :) I thought about a Behringer, but they won't do 96k, so that wouldn't work unless you're doing 44.1k or 48k obviously.

In my opinion, two of the most important things in your chain is your preamp and your conversion. That would definitely take care of conversion and for pres I'll probably get an SCA chassis with two C84s to begin with and add some others as time and my hopefully "growing selection of mics" allow. :)

Just thought I'd point this out. I think this would make for a great basis for a great home studio. Everything in your chain matters, but to me conversion, mic pres, and mics (in that order) are three of the most important, and this combo would be freakin' sweet and would work with just about any DAW.

Also, one last thing. This is assuming you're wanting to mix in the box. If you're wanting to mix out of the box, you'll be much better off doing 48k outputs so you can have more outs at once (32 instead of 16) to feed back through your mixing tool of choice. BUT, I figure if you're doing that, you'll have an HD system anyway. Thats my ultimate goal personally (to mix outside the box, that is).

Any thoughts?

Brandon
 
I just noticed that the Presonus Central Station may be a good solution to add to this setup.

It has digital inputs so you could use the S/PDIF and analog outs of your Lightbridge to feed your monitors and one stereo or two mono cues. :)

I think that shall be my gameplan as I probably won't need more than two cues in a home studio... :cool:

Brandon
 
Yeh that's a good little setup to be honest. When you start using your interface just as a way of piping stuff into your comp (ie, not for conversion or preamp'ing), you should be able to get away with something fairly cheap, and provided your front-end system is up to par, have a pretty good sound quality.

I have to say I'm surprised that the lightbridge only has 2 ADAT outs on it! Although as you pointed out using the Central Station would free up those 2 outs to use as cues..


I'm guessing your studying Rec Arts at MTSU? I have a friend who did that course, graduated 7 or 8 years ago. How you finding it?
 
I thought the Lightbridge had 4 ADAT outs and only two analog outs on it. I am pretty sure thats what it does and the original poster was referring to the fact that with the Apogee AD16 has no D/A which means you would have to use the lightbridge for monitoring. Another option for the headphones at least, sin ce the D/A quality will not be as important here is to spend another $200 and add a Behringer ADA8000 which will increase the number of analog outputs for headphone monitoring to 8.
 
Messianic:

I agree! Having items that are dedicated to only one task is a great way (generally) to improve the overall chain and thats definitely what I'm trying to do with this system.

The Lightbridge only has 2 ANALOG outs. :) It has 4 TOSLINK outs, stereo S/PDIF, and 2 analog outs totaling 36 outputs. Sorry if I wasn't clear earlier.

I absolutely LOVE the RIM program at MTSU. As long as you're there with the right attitude (IE, your degree is not going to get you a job... you networking while getting your degree will, though, assuming you have the social and technical skills) you'll get the absolute most you can out of the program and probably best of all, its a state school so tuition isn't RIDICULOUS *cough*Full*cough*Sail*cough*. :cool: Not to mention its a full on 4 year degree and they have a graduate program as well.

xstatic: I thought about using the Behringer for 8 cheap outputs, but then I realized it won't clock with the rest of the system at 96k... so that won't work! :)

Also, I'll probably add a Black Lion Audio MicroClock for clocking duties... although I'm suspecting the Apogee won't be too bad until I get it. :)

Thanks for the replies!

Brandon
 
NeveSSL said:
Also, I'll probably add a Black Lion Audio MicroClock for clocking duties... although I'm suspecting the Apogee won't be too bad until I get it. :)
Click to expand...

unless the Apogee has a particularly unreliable clock, or that the BLA clock is really MILES better than the apogee's, I would suggest that you'd be better off using the Apogee Clock.

Are you familiar with how PLL's work? I've done tests of clocking one piece of gear off another and measure the clock jitter, and for the most part (even mid-range pro gear) there's less jitter when using the clocks closest to the converters.

Of course, clock a Behringer off a Prism or the like will make a big difference...but I wouldn't be surprised if the extra quality is really noticeable when clocking the Apogee from the BLA.
 
Yeah, I'm not sure man. I'm thinking I should be able to find SOMEONE with one in Nashville that I could test out when the time comes (assuming I'm here :) ). I've heard absolutely great things about the MicroClock and its not terribly expensive. I would kind of rather have a dedicated clock than have a bunch of things daisy-chained, but I'll definitely listen once I get to that point. You're right, the Apogee may have as good of clocking. If nothing else, I'm sure I won't have a problem selling the MicroClock. :)

It seems like I heard something about one of the rental houses in Nashville renting them out... but I can't remember for sure.

I'll play it by ear. I've first got to get a good job before I'll have the cash to buy all this crap! :)

Brandon
 
dont believe this clock nonsense. Go to Lavry's site and read up. You will have MUCH bigger results on your audio changing the brand of your shampoo than your clock.
 
I'm going to be honest... Lavry rubs me the wrong way, so I don't want to read his papers. So in the end, I'll just try out the MicroClock and see what happens. :) An unfortunately common thing in audio is to read into specs too much.

When it all comes down to it, its all about the music and about the sound. I don't want to get too cliche' here, but I think you know what I'm saying. I'll listen to the MicroClock hooked up to my system and make a judgement myself as to whether it improves anything or not.

I'm honestly sure he has some great points, but his ego just annoys me.

Have you tried any clocks or anything? I'm definitely not trying to be a jerk, just curious as to why you agree with Lavry exactly. More specifically, has your own experience reflected that clocks are pointless?

Brandon
 
Lavry is only trying to state reality and scientific perspective into terms easier to understand by us laymen.

If you think Lavry's ego is harsh, you oughtta see who it is that he's arguing with in that particular thread, THE ego.

There is an entire structure set up to rob suckers of their money. In the pro audio world we like to laugh at Audiophiles and their shakti Stones, cable lifts, magical platters and the like, but in truth we are taken in just as much as they are in all sorts of nonsense marketing malarchy

Both I and Dan Lavry have products to sell. In his case he is HURTING his bottom line by not pushing clock magic. If he were to make a clock, everyone would buy it, but his integrity is above that sort of shmuckery. Similarly is his (and science's) stance on 192khz. He stands to make a killing by bilking the suckers, but he wont do it.

There are things that matter a lot, things that matter a little and things that dont matter at all.

I run an external clock often (Lucid GenX6 96) when a situation calls for it. I have run many clocks of different makes. In truth if any single converter is improved in any way by running an external clock, then that converter is a piece of crap and is undoubtably hurting your audio far worse in other ways.

When you have multiple units, then you may end up having to use an external clock, or using the clock of any of those devices as master. As long as the device has enough oomph to drive the number of clocks you need to, and you have the proper termination setup, the difference between the best clock and a decent clock is totally negligable.

Here is my "scale of factor importance in the value of a song" from a paper I'm working on


1. The writing of the song
2. The performing of the song
3. The skill of the tracking engineer
4. The skill of the mixing engineer
5. The sense and taste, not to mention skill of the mastering engineer
6. The quality of the instruments played by the performers
7. The acoustic quality of the recording and monitoring environment
8. The brand of recording equipment used

Don't get too caught up in number 8, its just not that important
 
Very cool, man.

Personally, I'm wanting the clock for the reason you mentioned... keeping everything on the same page as opposed to improving the converters. :)

What do you consider a situation that requires a clock?

Thanks for that explanation. Very well put!

Brandon
 
That's exactly the situation that requires one. There's a lot of confusion on that one though, chances are you already own a device with a good enough clock to pull it off.

The clock issue is one that still throws me, and one great thing about an external clock is also the worst thing: convenience. If you have everything slaved, you can switch sample rates as simply as flicking a switch on the clock itself...the problem comes when someone used to the autoswitching nature of daw's and most hardware forgets this fact. All of a sudden a project is recording 44k while the clock is set to 48

Post #21 gets into this a bit here: http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19675
 
Dude... I've experienced plenty of clocking issues exactly like what you're talking about.

All I'm going to say is that we have a Studer D950 here at MTSU... :eek:

Its also known as the "Stutter". ;)

Thanks for your feedback, man.

Brandon
 
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NeveSSL said:
What do you consider a situation that requires a clock?
Click to expand...

When you need to slave a significant number of devices to each other reliably. That's it. The only way a clock would help with instability issues would be if the clock were so far out of spec (e.g. 43.95 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz) that the PLL in the slave device couldn't lock to it. If so, though, you run the risk that driving both devices with an external clock might result in the formerly master device refusing to lock to a legitimate clock rate, in which case you're still just as stuck. You might as well just swap the master/slave relationship between the two devices unless they can't agree on a sync format.

Oh, that would be the other reason. If you have a device that takes S/PDIF and you want to drive it with another device with a really horrible clock that puts out S/PDIF but can only slave to word clock, you can use an external clock generator as a format converter to convert the S/PDIF output of what would otherwise be the slave into a word clock output suitable for the crappy device (or drive both with the clock in free run mode---whichever you prefer).

If the goal is to "fix" the sound, though, unless you're getting lots of dropouts (the sync light turns red and you lose a second of sound or whatever), you'll almost always get a million times more improvement by upgrading the analog section than by using an external clock. The PLL circuit in your interface is either good or it isn't. If it is, it will do a great job of smoothing out the minute amount of jitter from even the cheapest internal clock. If it isn't, it's going to create more jitter from an external clock than an internal one (no matter how good the external clock might be) because of the way the high frequencies are rolled off as cable length increases, causing a square wave pulse to eventually look like a sine wave.... :)
 
NeveSSL said:
What do you consider a situation that requires a clock?
Click to expand...

Honestly?

Very few.

Does the Apogee unit have a WC output on it? If so, and if you want to clock multiple devices off it, buy a distribution amp and set up a start-shaped distribution system. Every thing would be clocked off the Apogee (which i'm sure has a quality clock in it), you wouldn't be daisy-chaining devices (so no PLL-induced clocking errors).

Honestly, external clocks (for 99.9% of the world) is a bunch of bullshit. Read Lavry's papers and do some tests yourself. Test units like the Neumann ADA-2 will be able to measure clock jitter, so try clocking things off of different clocks and compare the jitter to that of using its own clock.

You may not like Lavry but the guy has more integrity than most other manufacturers out there..
 
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