complete recording setup

[gobblefisher]

I welcome any suggestions for my situation.

I wish to record primarily orchestra and chamber ensemble music in stereo. I will do this based of a mac os x platform, probably an iMac G5 1.8 gHz processor with 1 GB of ram.

What I'd like to know is what interface you'd suggest for this. Firewire or USB? 24-bit 96 kHz or 192 kHz? I'm trying to keep the price down around five to seven hundred USD, but am open to other suggestions.

 

[dgatwood]

Firewire. As a bus, USB just doesn't cut it by comparison. The CPU overhead for shoving large amounts of data over USB is significantly greater than Firewire. And Firewire is just a lot more reliable for doing audio in Mac OS X in general, from what I've read. (Personally, my sound hardware is PCI in a G5 tower....)

Realistically, unless you're trying to compensate for really, REALLY lousy filter hardware in the audio interface, 96k should be plenty. Anyone who says you need 192 is kidding him/herself. Or, put another way, being able to accurately reproduce WWV time radio with your audio card is not a useful feature unless you are doing video and are too cheap to invest in something with time code, and even then, not particularly so.

Definitely 24-bit.

 

[usernamebob]

is that 500-700 for the interface, or for the whole setup?

if it's the whole setup you'll probably be looking at getting a DMP3 and a pair of oktava 012s or something similar into a cheap usb or firewire interface (firewire is better, but usb is fine if your only doing 2 channels)

if thats just for the interface and you only want two channels of ins you could probably look at something like a lynx22 or someother similar high end card