Mixer Help, please!

  • Thread starter Thread starter diebydesign_x
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If I was starting out afresh and know what I know now I would take the following route:-

Purchase two Behringer Ultragain Pro-8 Digital ADA8000 which is an 8 channel ADAT A/D converter which will give you a total of 16 channels. You could argue that the mic pre's are not the best but if you're on a tight budget then you need to make compromises somewhere. You should be able to pick up two units for $460 or thereabouts.

Ultragain

And then you'll need a suitable audio card with ADAT cabability and I would recommend the RME Hammerfall Light DIGI9636 which you can pick up for around $400.

DIGI9636

If you don't have any DAW software then I'd recommend Sonar 5 which costs around $300.

You may then decide that you need some mastering software. I'm currentley getting into Sound Forge 8 and with that you get bundled a package called CD Architect which is used for burning your masters to CD. That costs around $270. In the future you could purchase some of the higher quality plugins but for now you could probably manage with the plugins that come bundled with Sonar and Sound Forge.

Well... so far that comes to $1430 so I guess that's not much help... and you haven't even bought the cables and such yet. But... it's food for thought and give you another option to consider...



andy
 
dgatwood said:
You're joking, right? 11 Mbps? Designed to compete with SCSI? The original SCSI was 5 MBps (that's 5 MegaBytes per second, or over 40 Mbps) back in the 1980s. SCSI-2 came out in 1989, at 10MBps (80 Mbps). By the time USB 1.0 came out in 1995, SCSI-3 had been codified for... I think 2 years... and devices had started shipping. SCSI-3 came in at 40 MBps (320 Mbps).
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What I said (perhaps not too well) was that Intel wanted a single method that could do what serial, parallel, PS2 and SCSI did. It was their answer to the perceived complexity of the Wintel hardware I/O platform. I'm not saying it was a great answer. And yes, the SCSI spec is obsolete. I said nothing about USB replacing fast/wide SCSI, SCSI 2 or SCSI 3, only that they wanted a spec that combined the functional capabilities of all the curent PC I/O protocols in a plug-and-play manner and in a single cable/bus format. This is not revisionist history, this is as it was explained, first-draft, in the tech news articles of the time. Now, if they got it wrong (entirely possible), then I'm getting it wrong, and I'll apologize for them and myself for that.

dgatwood said:
It's not a myth. If you comply with the USB audio spec, at 192 kHz, bandwidth DOES limit USB to 2 channels. Again, I repeat, even a mere 3 channels at 192kHz 24-bit sampling is a violation of the USB audio spec, as there IS NO USB 2.0 audio spec (unless it has come out in the last six months or so and I missed it).
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You said yourself that USB has plenty of bandwidth, but you were led to believe there were other technical reasons that made USB too inefficient or too difficult to use. That may be the case, perhaps, there may be a "gotcha" in the tech detials of the spec that I don't know that keeps the sustained data rates down. But my point is that issue is almost beside the point. When you look at the actual history, there were other factors that led to FW as a de facto standard for this stuff that had little or nothing to do with USBs performance.

As you said, USB came out in about 1995. Firewire was developed by Apple (and OK maybe TI had a hand in it too because someone had to build the chips) in the mid 1980s, about a decade before USB (give or take a year or two.) While it didn't officially become IEEE1394 until 1995 - the same year as USB - Apple had already had it for about a decade*. And well before it was "official" it was already being adopted by Sony and others as a method of digital video transfer from camcorders to the PC.

BTW, this adaptation of a protocol before it becomes a standard published spec is rampant in computer history; the fact that USB2.0 is not an actual official spec has no weight in precidence as a reason for non-adaptation by the manufacturers. In fact, Apple themselves are using USB 2.0 as the interface for the video iPod. Not only are they using this "non-standard" in the single most popular electronic device made today, but they have actually dropped their own FW standard in favor of it.

But back to history as I witnessed it. A combination of FW already having years of foothold as an existing and even proven (if not yet "official") protocol by the time USB came around, combined with it's early adaptation by video manufacturers as an audio and video transport protocol before USB came around, and the fact that it was the hometown favorite of Apple, who dominated the A/V/G market for hardware platforms, established FW as the way to go, USB bandwidth or no USB bandwitdh. Frankly, USB didn't even enter into the equation at the time.

But it's a lot easier from a sales and marketing standpoint to blame the bandwidth - especially when one has to justify the higher cost of the FW interface, and THAT, in fact, is where I believe the revisionist history comes in.

*Interestingly enough, Wikipedia has it the other way around, saying that the 1394 spec came first in the 80s and Apple's implementation of it came in 1995. I'm not sure that is true, as I believe Firewire was part of the Mac group's efforts in the 80s to design a high-speed (at the time ~100Mbit) internal data bus. Either way, it doesn't change the equation that FW/1394 was a spec that had already been kicked around and been in use in one flavor or another for about ten years before Intel released USB.

G.
 
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Cyanide-Depende said:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Recording/Computer/Hardware?sku=184131

$599 10 channels, its firewire (my preference) the mic pre's arent great but they're still better than most. Also, you can daisy chain them to get 20-30 channels.

Comes with Cubase which isnt bad, but it works with protools and abelton
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Dude, this hunk of shit does not work Protools.



BTW, I really don't think its a hunk of shit, thats just for added effect. It DOES NOT work with Protools though.

6
 
Oh... it does work with abelton which I use and Cubase which It come with. Never-the-less it is an option :)

At least I know not to use it with protools now though, lol

sixways said:
Dude, this hunk of shit does not work Protools.



BTW, I really don't think its a hunk of shit, thats just for added effect. It DOES NOT work with Protools though.

6
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I was really just kidding about the unit being a hunk of $hit. If I didn't want to use protools, thats what I would have got.

6
 
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