24 tracks at 96k live recording: will this setup keep up?
- Thread starter BookSix
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jmorris
New member
I think the only think that would be a question of " keeping up" would be a computer in this list, the G5 with those spec's should do fine. But my question is: with motu mic pre's why do 96k? Great River, API etc. fine.I mean why 96k evan at all?
Joseph Hanna
Active member
No HD and or Surround spec I've ever seen call for 96k.
Whale Bone
New member
I'm curious, are 24 tracks at 96K or 48K too much for firewire (or USB) external drives?
dgatwood
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Red flags went off just now. You do not want to track to USB, much less 24 tracks. You'll take a huge CPU hit doing that. Add a second internal SATA drive if you need more storage. It's pretty easy to do in the G5.
There are four little rubber bumpers screwed into the side of the hard drive part of the machine. You screw those into the correct four holes (IIRC,the middle holes and the holes farthest away from the connectors). Then, you plug the wires in and slide the drive in until it locks in place.
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Whale Bone
New member
I'm not actually trying to do it. My instinct would also be to use an internal drive, but I'm wondering if people are actually pulling it off. So, if emphatically not USB, would Firewire (assuming best case scenario where the interface is happy with the firewire chipset) be up to the task up 24 simultaneous tracks at 96K or even 48K?
Bluray and HD-DVD both use 96k so I was aiming for those goal, can always bring it down. I'm not sure the client will require 96k yet, but I was just looking into it. I plan on running 2 firewire 400 drives for audio only (each sharing half of the load). I could go dual internal but my G5 currently only accommodates 2 SATA drives so I'd have to boot off firewire (no issues there)...
And yes Whale Bone, this is true; no on the USB. I would never run a USB drive in the studio. I yell at my clients when they buy them even just for back-ups!! Firewire bare minimum for recording, and like it was stated, internals are better when possible. Not sure how many tracks FW can handle though. I've tracked about 10 to a FW 400 drive at a small live recording gig and I think I've done 14 drum mics straight to FW 400 drives in the studio. But then again , that was all 44.1k.
And dgatwood, I'm not looking for additional storage (I already have a pair of 400 gig SATA's in the tower) but more looking at the fact that high sample rates writes a LOT of data and a single drives write speed probably won't be up to the task, unless I get an expensive 10,000 rpm unit..
And yes Whale Bone, this is true; no on the USB. I would never run a USB drive in the studio. I yell at my clients when they buy them even just for back-ups!! Firewire bare minimum for recording, and like it was stated, internals are better when possible. Not sure how many tracks FW can handle though. I've tracked about 10 to a FW 400 drive at a small live recording gig and I think I've done 14 drum mics straight to FW 400 drives in the studio. But then again , that was all 44.1k.
And dgatwood, I'm not looking for additional storage (I already have a pair of 400 gig SATA's in the tower) but more looking at the fact that high sample rates writes a LOT of data and a single drives write speed probably won't be up to the task, unless I get an expensive 10,000 rpm unit..
Joseph Hanna
Active member
Gotcha. The spec (as I understand it) includes "up to" 96K which is of course subject to all the endless discussions around the practicality of it all.
Don't have the drive to get in "those" discussions anymore but were it I it'd be 24bit 44.1K for a live recording.....for all sorts of reasons.
dgatwood
is out. Leave a message.
Quick math. 24 tracks * 96000 samples / second * 3 bytes / sample = a little over 7 MB/second. I've seen 5400 RPM drives that could do several times that.
I wouldn't worry about write throughput, bus latency caused by sharing a FireWire bus notwithstanding. The stock internal drive @ 7200 RPM should do it without breaking a sweat. That said, I've never tried it, so you may well find I'm wrong in practice. If I am, though, I'd sure love to benchmark the system and figure out why.
Massive Master
www.massivemastering.com
I'd use a hard-disk standalone unit at 48kHz (for video). No way in hell I'd trust *any* system to chunk 24 tracks at 24/96 for 90 minutes. I wouldn't even bet on it holding up at 48kHz. But a Mackie or Alesis 24-channel recorder? Probably.
Oh, i hear what you're saying. This is very true. But none the less, even with poor pre's and converters, 96k would have some benefit, especially when editing will be involved. I wish there was a bigger budget for better pre's and converters... maybe in the future (this first run is a trial to consider doing this monthly).
jmorris
New member
Should be fun! But what benifit in editing when recording 96k?