Interface guidance

[foggie]

Hi - Obviously newbie here. I'll try not and bore any of you with the same 'ol question etc..

What's the best...........I'm kidding! I’m looking to get into a recording interface. I have been reading plenty - enough to make my head turn to mush to know there are a gazillion options

I'm a drummer but am new to the recording side of things and have been wanting to get into this forever (fascinated). I'm finding that there are just as many “reviewers” that claim “solution A” is fantastic as there are that say “solution A” sucks etc..and a lot of this has to do with really finding out for yourself what works.

So without asking what’s the best (which is pointless and impossible to answer), is there anything, be it tips, experiences, guidelines or things to avoid that would help facilitate me in a general direction?

Again for all intensive purposes I’m a newbie at this stuff but have read a ton and am pretty familiar with many of the options available.

- My budget would be less than $1k – (I’m thinking $300-$700 for the interface and the rest for miscellaneous.)
- I have a few good mics => overheads, snare and kick (to start with)
- I have a good computer
- Minimum of four tracks but it seems to make sense to get more (8)
- I'm technically savy (computer)
- I have a pretty good understanding of acoustics, studio construction, soundproofing etc..
- I'm looking to mainly record drums and to compose

I have researched the following:

Firewire solution – Motu 8Pre (the one I'm considering), Presonus firepod/project, Focusrite sapphire pro, Alesis io 26, Tascam FW-1082 or a Firewire mixer (Phonic, Alesis)

PCI solution – Delta, Motu 2408

USB – Tascam US-1641. As far as USB though, I read both sides of this - “works great” or “do NOT do it, it sucks”. Although, I would tend to side with the don’t do it crowd as a firewire card performs / takes all of the load and not the CPU. Your basic computer equipped USB 2.0 cannot “guarantee” sustained throughput like firewire. But again many people have had great luck.

Multitrack - ?? Yamaha 1600, Alesis ?? Have not really considered this and it certainly has its application but I'm thinking the computer route is going to give me the most flexibility and bang for the buck?

One other thing I'm looking for guidance is, does it make sense to start out really small (USB mixer or "sound card") just to get the feel for all of this (upgrade later) instead of plunking down $1k on something I have very little experience?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated and thanks for any assistance at this point in my venture

 

[dgatwood]

Firewire solution – Motu 8Pre (the one I'm considering), Presonus firepod/project, Focusrite sapphire pro, Alesis io 26, Tascam FW-1082 or a Firewire mixer (Phonic, Alesis)

8Pre is a nice piece of hardware, IMHO, with really good drivers. FIREPOD is solid software-wise, but the hardware seems to have a lot of failures. Project is evil DICE II hardware. I can't say much about the rest of those.

PCI solution – Delta, Motu 2408

I don't suggest these. PCI is being phased out. While it won't be gone tomorrow, I wouldn't go dropping lots of money on PCI hardware. A $50 FireWire card, sure, but I wouldn't spend much more than that.

USB – Tascam US-1641. As far as USB though, I read both sides of this - “works great” or “do NOT do it, it sucks”. Although, I would tend to side with the don’t do it crowd as a firewire card performs / takes all of the load and not the CPU. Your basic computer equipped USB 2.0 cannot “guarantee” sustained throughput like firewire. But again many people have had great luck.

For most people, it either works perfectly or doesn't work at all, and no amount of tweaking will ever make it work for people in the second category. If you go USB, make sure you buy from a dealer that allows returns, and make sure you don't open the software packet; download the drivers from the vendor's website....

One other thing I'm looking for guidance is, does it make sense to start out really small (USB mixer or "sound card") just to get the feel for all of this (upgrade later) instead of plunking down $1k on something I have very little experience?

I wouldn't. The small stuff isn't usually all that good, and it's not like you can add on later. You'd be replacing it outright. Might as well start with something that will last.

 

[foggie]

Thanks dgatwood. I appreciate the feeback.

As you stated, the 8Pre seems like a solid choice and is probably what I'll end up with.

In the connection "chain" are dedicated mic pre's required for some/most of these solutions. Or is this something additional that gets you into the pro territory so to speak? in other words is there a way (spec) to know if the stock pre's are sufficient? This is just more out of curiosity than anything.

Originally Posted by dgatwood
I don't suggest these. PCI is being phased out. While it won't be gone tomorrow, I wouldn't go dropping lots of money on PCI hardware. A $50 FireWire card, sure, but I wouldn't spend much more than that.

Interesting, thanks for pointing this out. So I"m assuming Firewire is the standard nowadays? I thought I remember hearing from someone that Firewire would be "phased out" because any product using it has to pay Mac the rights to use it. Is there any truth to that or is that complete BS?

Thanks again

 

[santiu]

I'm going to concur with pretty much everything dgatwood said. I'd go for something firewire, and of your choices I like the 8pre (and I don't think firewire will be phased out, until they come up with a suitable replacement. USB2.0 may have the same data rates, but it's a bus and it eats up your processor).

One option i highly suggest is maybe not getting your heart set on one unit, but rather open it up to a couple, and then start searching for used. That way if you end up not really being into the whole recording thing, you can sell your gear off at a minimal cost (although finding an 8pre used may be hard since it's relatively new).

And i'd suggest you find something with at least 8 tracks + ADAT in (so you can expand later). I know as a drummer you'll want as many tracks as you can get just to play with. I started with a mixer going into two channels, and while it works, it's just tedious and not so much fun. I have waaay more fun now that i have more tracks (and for me it's all about fun, i'm not trying to run a business or anything).

And while this isn't interface related, and don't forget to save money for acoustic treatments. It really makes a world of difference. If I had the choice of getting nicer mics but no materials for acoustic treatments, or cheaper mics + acoustic treatments, I'd choose the latter any day.

 

[foggie]

I'm going to concur with pretty much everything dgatwood said. I'd go for something firewire, and of your choices I like the 8pre (and I don't think firewire will be phased out, until they come up with a suitable replacement. USB2.0 may have the same data rates, but it's a bus and it eats up your processor).

One option i highly suggest is maybe not getting your heart set on one unit, but rather open it up to a couple, and then start searching for used. That way if you end up not really being into the whole recording thing, you can sell your gear off at a minimal cost (although finding an 8pre used may be hard since it's relatively new).

And i'd suggest you find something with at least 8 tracks + ADAT in (so you can expand later). I know as a drummer you'll want as many tracks as you can get just to play with. I started with a mixer going into two channels, and while it works, it's just tedious and not so much fun. I have waaay more fun now that i have more tracks (and for me it's all about fun, i'm not trying to run a business or anything).

And while this isn't interface related, and don't forget to save money for acoustic treatments. It really makes a world of difference. If I had the choice of getting nicer mics but no materials for acoustic treatments, or cheaper mics + acoustic treatments, I'd choose the latter any day.

Cool thanks, good to know.

I'm glad you mentioned treatment - I didn't really consider that exp yet (over and above what I have already done). I agree that acoustics are a massive part of sound fidelity (of which I am extremely critical of). The room is soooo very important.

I finished an entire "un-finished" room from scratch (two layers of rock, RC channels the whole nine yards etc...). Yikes, THAT was an experience I'll never forget

 

[dgatwood]

T
Interesting, thanks for pointing this out. So I"m assuming Firewire is the standard nowadays? I thought I remember hearing from someone that Firewire would be "phased out" because any product using it has to pay Mac the rights to use it. Is there any truth to that or is that complete BS?

Well, the way I look at it is this: a standard will remain supportable as long as the technology exists to connect it to at least one supported bus type at a reasonable price.

With PCI, if you own PCI hardware and want to connect it to a computer that only supports PCI Express (which isn't compatible with legacy parallel PCI cards), the only choice is a ~$1500 PCI expansion chassis. If you have a $20,000 investment in custom PCI hardware, this maybe makes sense. For 99% of users, it means that the PCI hardware gets sold on eBay when they buy their first PCIe-only machine, and going prices for PCI cards fall like a rock. This already happened once to some degree in the audio space when Apple dropped parallel PCI support a few years ago. Notice that PCI cards are about half what they were three or four years back. Also notice that no new PCI audio interfaces (or very, very few, anyway) have been released in several years.

With FireWire, even if the standard were declared dead tomorrow, you'd still be able to buy FireWire cards for PCI Express slots, which probably would extend compatibility (assuming you have at least one spare FireWire card in storage "just in case") to whenever PCI Express is phased out, which would probably be at least a decade after parallel PCI is phased out.

There are also FireWire bridge chipsets readily available for other bus architectures like HyperTransport, which means that if external HyperTransport ever takes off, someone will be able to buy those chips and build fairly trivial devices for attaching FireWire hardware to that as well. There'a a lot of future-proofing in FireWire that just isn't there with parallel PCI—parallel PCI is an internal bus standard while FireWire is an external bus standard, thus making it far easier and cheaper to build consumer devices that bridge FireWire to other things....

Also, there is every reason to believe FireWire 3200 silicon will come out soon to compete head to head with USB 3.0 and eSATA, so I don't think FireWire is going anywhere soon.

Oh, and one final point: no tape-based camcorders use USB for video data at last check. The camcorder-like devices that do provide USB either A. are those micro webcam-like things that record onto onboard flash or hard drives (most of which have rather poor picture quality due to small image sensors and lenses) or B. are also still cameras, providing access to only the still photos via USB. Pretty much all HD video of consequence is FireWire-only, AFAIK. USB just wasn't made for audio and video.... FireWire, therefore, isn't likely to go away any time soon unless we all move to hard-drive-based video acquisition and just copy video files across instead of capturing. (This is actually a good idea in most cases, since it removes any possibility of glitches during capture, but it doesn't provide the ability to do live work with computers, so not everything can go that direction.)

 

[foggie]

Good info dgatwood.

Also, another thing I have not considered is HD space? Any recommendations as to capacity and internal and or external?

 

[dgatwood]

Good info dgatwood.

Also, another thing I have not considered is HD space? Any recommendations as to capacity and internal and or external?

On a desktop, internal if possible. That eliminates a whole lot of variables. On a laptop? I'd tend towards a case with eSATA, Firewire 400/800, and USB (e.g. the four-way case from LaCie). That way, you have options.

Capacity? As big as you can get at 7200 RPM. You can go 5400 if necessary, but don't go any slower. Don't go faster than 7200. The heat problems can be a problem at 10k/15k, leading to premature drive failures and additional fan requirements.