advice on studio gear list

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mr.smith

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I am preparing to convert my garage into a project studio capable of recording a small band live (say 3-4 piece). This is what I'm looking at for equipment to get the job done.
If anyone has any advice on things to add or delete from this list, or a piece of equipment that would work better than one I've chosen, please advise. Thanks!
the list
Computer from wave digital 800 mg pIII with fast scuzzy drives and 256 k ram + burner.
Two gadget labs 8/24 cards for up to 16 channels. I will probable use 10 at a time at most but just 8 will probably run me short.
Alesis studio 32 board or something equal.
Alesis M-1 powered monitors.
AKG drum mikes, 2 sm57's, 1 audix d3,
Bass DI(probably sans-amp), 1 rode nt2 for main vocals, 2 drum overheads(? have not made up mind on brand yet)
furman headphone monitor system.
Stands, cables, assorted stuff +
software (leaning toward vegas pro but not sure yet). = $10,000

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks again.
 
well Sonusman pointed me in the direction of RAID which I'd never heard about but had dreamed of - Raid allows you to use multiple disk drives at once which lessens the load on your hard drives - I recommend you contact him or wait for him to put his well informed bit it here

[This message has been edited by John Sayers (edited 07-13-2000).]
 
Sounds like a decent setup to me. I like a lot of things about Vegas Pro but it does have a few limitations that keep me from using it very much. But to be honest, I don't particularly like any mulit-tracking software I've worked with... I'm a sourpuss in that dept.

You might want to add a few channels of limiting to protect from digital overs. If you go "in the red" with digital, you'll end up with some nasty sounds. Vocals, snares, kicks, and bass are some major culprits. A couple of external mic pre-amps might round it off nicely. The ones on most mixers are very vanilla and transparent. Something with some color is nice for vocs, drums, and guitars.
 
Just a quick note - there are those on this BBS who would suggest that skuzzi drives are a waste of money for audio recording and that you are just as well of with UEIDE. But I've never used SCSI.

If you are just using the pc for audio, you might want to bear this in mind.

matt
 
If you want monster performance on your disks, go for RAID0 (RAID zero). That will allow you to setup a number of disks that the computer will see as one large disk. The read/write load will be distributed over several disks so the performance will increase a lot. You need a special RAID controller card for it but the FastTrack66 is a cheap one for IDE disks so that's the way to go. However, RAID0 have one big disadvantage, lack of data integrity. If you for example have setup 4 20GB disks to work as one large and fast 80GB disk and one disk breaks down, you loose all 80GB of data as the data is spread over all disks and cannot be recreated without all disks. Not too fun.

That's why RAID0+1 was invented (I presume). In a RAID0+1 setup, you will only get half the storage capacity of your combined disks but the data integrity is 100% (almost anyway) and be best part is, performance will actually be even better for DAW applications. In RAID0+1, assuming that you use the FastTrack66 card, you take four disks of say 20GB and will get 40GB of ultra-performing, safe, storage.

This is done by distributing the write load on half of the disks (that are in a RAID0 configuration) and mirror (write exactly the same thing) them to the other disks as well. Mirroring is also known as RAID1 and hence the name RAID0+1.

RAID0+1 is slower in the write performance than RAID0 with the same number of disks as the write load will only be distributed on half of the disks (although it writes to all four) but read performance will actually be even faster as the computer can read from both the "original dataa" and the mirrored disks at the same time.

In DAW applications, read performance is more important than write as you may have 40 tracks playing (read) while recording 2 new (write) but you'll rarely have the opposite.

The benefit of having all your data on two disks is of course obvious. One crashed hard disk can waste years of work, or that perfect take, in the normal case but you would need to have two disk failing at the same time in a RAID0+1 coniguration. It would even have to be the "right" two disks as it has do be one of the RAID0 disks and its mirrored disk that has to fail in order for you to loose data.

Did it make any sense? If so, that's one for the FAQ

/Ola
 
One more thing, SCSI will perform better in most applications but not necessarily in DAW applications and it's definetly not worth the extra cost.

In simplified terms:

SCSI is better at many small read/write tasks, like in a server application where maybe thousands fo people access small files at the same time.

The DAW case is the exact opposite, very few but very large read/write tasks. IDE can even outperform SCSI here if everything is setup ideally.

That's another on for the FAQ.
 
really booking up these FAQ arent we ola... keep up the good work ... LOL

Spider
 
I'm sure there's a lot of other people who'd like to have their say in these matters as well. Anyone care to elaborate on the IDE vs. SCSI issue? :D
 
Heya. Just a mention with all the talk of RAID drives and so forth... I'd HIGHLY recommend making sure that you do periodic backups - not just of the mixes, but of all the samples and raw materials you get. You could use either your CD-R to do that (though if you've got 40 GB of disk space, that's 50-60 cd's worth!) or a DLT or AIT tape drive (that's what computer professionals use on their servers, for instance...) and then store the backups OFF SITE.

Losing your studio in an accident (fire/flood/theft) would suck, but if you at least save your music, hopefully you are insured for the equipment....

OldGrover "Professional Paranoid"
 
I'll elaborate ont he IDE v. SCSI issue. But first, Ola, you're not entirely correct about RAID0...it doesnt lighten the load, it simply prevents multiple partitions. Raid 3 and up should lighten the load...4 and 5 especially, they wont increase size of drive...and the drive must all be the same size (oh yeah and NT is a must...) but the performance is KICK-BUTT!

IDE v. SCSI...UDMA/66 7200 rpm drives are ALMOST as fast as a SCSI 2 drive, and faster than any SCSI 1. They go no where near SCSI 3. To be honest, unless you need virtually limitless expandability so far as number of drives and RAIDs...SCSI 2 and less probably won't be worth the money...were it me, I'd do it anyhow...for the expandability options. You simply do not know what's going to hppen int he future. so far as your computer is concerned, i HIGHLY recomend getting an OnStream 30gb tape backup drive. Great ECC on it, and eachc art holds 30gb, relatively fast for a tape drive too. I set a server up with one some months ago. They run 250 and down.

Music equipment: get alot of cable and different sizes...get GOOD reference monitors. It's already been mentioned, but...compressor/limiters are a must. I'd say one on each channel to be honest. Keep a set of headphones for each person that might be in the studio around. Sound funny, but personally when i have people sitting in a session, i find that they shut up better if you put a head set on their ears! :-)
 
I want to thank everyone for their input on
this. I forgot to mention about the backup system, but the tape drive sounds like the way to go without spending tons o' money.
While recording in K.C., I got the chance to use the furman headphone system. It was great because everyone had the power to dial in the different parts just the way they wanted. I would highly recommend it due in large to the fact that it is very musician friendly. I want to keep my little studio that way as much as possible. Again, thanks to all of you folks for the help.
 
Skywalker - I'm sorry to say that you got it all backwards. At least according to all information I ever read on RAID.

According to several manufacturers of RAID controllers and descriptions of RAID technology. RAID0 increases performance as I described above but has no inherent fault tolerence (and is thus sometimes not even considered "real" RAID). RAID3 has poor write performance as all parity data is written to a single disk. RAID3 still has the best performance for the DAW case with few large reads/writes but it's not as good as RAID0.
RAID3 and up have a common factor and that is fault tolerence at a "low" price.
RAID1 has the best recovery time (almost 0)at a disk failure but it costs double the amount of disks as you get storage. RAID3, 4 and 5 cost only one extra disk but it can take hours to recreate the data. Six 20GB disks in a RAID5 configuration gives you 100GB of fault tolerent storage. At a lower performance than each single disk though.

Check these links and you'll see
http://www.us.dell.com/us/en/hea/topics/vectors_1999-raid.htm http://www.net-engineer.com/raidinfo.html http://www.sst-storage.com/technology_pages/RAID.html

Oh, the SCSI vs. IDE thing was a joke. It has been covered a zillion times here. I agree with you though :)

/Ola




[This message has been edited by ola (edited 07-19-2000).]
 
Ola- Glad to see someone agrees with me on SCSI v. IDE! :-) You're right, i went back and looked up some RAID info...i was partially right...and partially wrong...i haven't dealt with a RAID config in a while so you'll have to forgive me! I was confusing RAID 0 with a linear RAID :-) Sorry for the misinformation!

Derek
 
I'd like to explore RAID a little bit more.
Which level 0, 1, 5... of raid would best suit a DAW? What 'inexpensive' disks would you use as the virutal master?
 
i don't have anything around that range, but just from reading around here, it seems like for similar features and cost of the alesis32 you can find better boards.... read some other posts
 
Skywalker - No probs, it happens to all of us. Also, I think that you will find that most people here agree with you on the IDE vs. SCSI issue.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by BDeetz:
Which level 0, 1, 5... of raid would best suit a DAW?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

RAID0+1 offers the best DAW performance as far as I can see. The write load is spread over multiple disks and reading can take place from multiple disks simultaniously. You also get almost 100% fault tolerence, which means that you don't have to spend money on tape backup devices etc. You might want to look into tape storage anyway as even RAID0+1 won't protect you from theft or fire. As we're talking about very valuble data, i.e. music, you want to make sure that you have it safe. The down-side of RAID0+1 si of course is that you need twice as many disks as you get storage. Painful with SCSI, not so bad with IDE.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by BDeetz:
What 'inexpensive' disks would you use as the virutal master?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

:confused:

/Ola
 
0+1 is great... that is what a lot of heavy disk usage applications use. It is a combo of speed and great reliability. For instance, the company I work for (I'm an Information Technology guy, not a professional musician) uses 0+1 on our database server.

Basically, 0+1 means that you have two sets of disks, both set up in raid 0 (very fast, no redundancy) and then you mirror (raid 1) the two sets. So you get great redundancy, great speed. The problem is that you buy all the disks twice.... yuck.

If you want SERIOUS speed, you go SCSI with multiple controllers and get the 10,000 RPM disks. Then you'd want to have multiple controllers and as many spindles (disks) as you can. So you'd be in great shape if you had 2 controllers (one for each mirror set) and 4-5 9gb 10,000 RPM disks on each set.

Pricy, but if you want the best...

Obviously, you can scale this down until it gets in your price range.
 
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