Mona Laptop?

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MightyOne

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Will the Mona Laptop act as a badass soundcard or will I need an additional soundcard?

With a badass laptop, the Mona Laptop, and the Cubasis that comes with the Mona could that potentially be all I might need to make badass recordings (provided that the talent in front of and behind the boards in up to snuff)?

Thanks.
 
From what I've heard about the Mona is that it's a pretty dang good card. The preamps on it are supposed to be good too (alone worth the money that it costs). The sucky thing about the mona is that it only has 4 inputs (but 6 outs, hmmm) and no Midi, I believe. If you can live with this then yes it's probably a damn good card...

Laptops can be discouraging and many people here will try to discourage you from using one. But I say go for it. The biggest limitation with a laptop is the slow hard drive. Most run at 4500 rpms, when your average desktop drives run at 7200. Because of this you'll get about half the tracks you normally would, but if you are recording with only 4 inputs anyway, I'm guessing you aren't planning to use a ton of tracks anyway.

Two ways to help this out are using an external 7200 firewire hard drive and record in 16 bit rather than 24 (I could get shot for saying this around here ;) ).
 
Sal - Average hard drives run at 5400 rpm. Most people in sound get 7200 for better performance.

I think the Mona would be ok for you. I have also heard they have good preamps. Not to mention that Echo has pretty good support.

BUT......I personally like the MOTU 828. It is firewire and can be linked with other 828's or other 896's. It only has a total of 8 inputs. 2 XLR with phantom, and six 1/4''. Do you really need 4 XLR inputs?? I think it is a better deal at the same price and it will work on almost any system with a firewire card. So you could easily use it on your laptop and a desktop. It is $699 st www.audiomidi.com. For 400 bucks more get the 896 and get preamps on every channel.

Beezoboy
 
The whole firewire laptop to desktop flexibility is definately a bonus, if you max out your laptop when recording you can always go and add more tracks or effect later on a firewire equipped desktop. The MONA card is only good for the MONA unit however, if you buy a firewire card for the laptop and a MOTU 828 or 896 you can use it for any kind of firewire peripheral (HD, CD-RW, etc). There is also the added flexibility of being able to add on an additional 828 or 896 when you have more money. Although I'm sure that a laptop could not handle 16 inputs simulataneously. I like the cuemix feature of the 828, it allows you to monitor while recording directly without latency.
 
i have a mona and it's outstanding. the preamps are very clean. drivers are solid in win2k. you can also direct monitor the input signals.

not using it with my laptop yet but i'll check back once i get that working to give a review.
 
Thanks for the pointouts/recommendations.

I haven't been totally persuaded against the MONA laptop but I'll definitely give the MOTU 828 considerable consideration.

Regarding the limitations of the MONA: I'm not into MIDI but if ever I were to become into it could I just use one of those Midiman 1 in/out things with other stuff that had been recorded with the MONA?
If I were to record a band live in the studio, could I mix multiple drum mics through two outputs of a mixer and into two inputs of the MONA and achieve good results?

What is the difference in quality with a PC card vs. Firewire?
 
yeah you can get a device that will hook up midi via a serial or parallel port (probably usb too). I've never used one of these, so I wonder if there would be any weird latency issues since it's not integrated with the card - probably not (or not much). Does anybody know for sure?

I'm guessing the pcmcia card port would be faster than firewire, especially since an adapter card that plugs into a pcmcia card slot can handle two firewire ports. However, I heard that the MOTU 896 only uses up about a quarter of the (100 mbits per second) of the firewire bandwidth anyway.

Like I said earlier, your largest limiting factor will be your hard drive speed. I wonder if they make any hard drive enclosures that plug into a pcmcia port... Does anybody know this?

-Sal
 
hmmm

I just did a search and it turns out one of my above assumptions above was wrong. PCMCIA is much slower than firewire. PCMCIA transfers as 20 Mbytes per sec, while firewire transfers at 50 Mbytes per sec. So if my reasoning is correct, if you plug in a firewire adapter card into a PCMCIA slot you'll get a total of 20 Mbytes per second between the two firewire ports not 50 Mbytes for each (100 Mbytes total) port. Ouch. If you're going to get a laptop, try to get one with a firewire port built in, so that you can get full transfer speed.

Here's the website I found that details the ports, (look at chart at the bottom):

http://www.quatech.com/Application_Objects/FAQs/comm-over-pcmcia.htm
 
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