Order of operations

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SilentSound

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I am taking Ed's advice and getting a Lynxone soundcard after a band pays me on saturday. BUt i am still unsure as to the order i want to do stuff. I mix to dat and want to go through a behringer multiband with AES/EBU then into the computer, but the behringer is 24bit. I am thinking of just letting the dat's coverters do their bidness and then go balanced out of dat to behringer, then digital out of behringer to digital in on computer and record at 24bit to cool edit to....umm.....edit.....it... What you think???? (No offense to Ed that I have to do mastering in my studio!!) I refuse to mention what OS i use
 
I am supposed to not be posting for a while here, but couldn't refuse.

Why mix to DAT and miss out on those nice sounding 24 bit converters? Mix to the soundcard first, then dither down, then go to DAT for storage. I can tell you that recordings done this way will sound much better than going to a 16 bit DAT converter first.

Often devices that are 24 bit will take any bit length that is shorter. I would either mix directly to the Behringer unit and output it to the soundcard, then use software to dither and resample, or, go to the soundcard first, saving the files as 24 bit, process them, the out to the Behringer then to DAT just for storage. You could then after compiling all your mixes to DAT trasfer them digitally back to the computer and burn your master CD. But what a waste of time. Why even use the DAT at all except for storage. Even then, if you had a CD burner on the computer, you could save ALL you mixes in the original 24bit 49kHz format by authoring a DATA CD Rom.

Good luck.

Ed
 
Yeah, that's my understanding as well - keep everything in 24-bit (preserving bit length and the integrity of the recorded sound) until the moment when you have to dither down to 16-bit so you can burn the CD.

But my lack of experience asks a question: how much of a difference can you actually hear? Do CDs really not sound as good as the 24-bit original?
 
No they don't. And 16 bit recordings do not sound as good as 24 bit recordings. I use a 24 bit soundcard, so I get that extra headroom no matter what bit length is playing. 16 originated recordings lack the same detail, and depth, and seem to have more distortion.
 
I was also planning on getting an outboard 24bit converter/dither or shape to 16 bit things to go in front of the dat the lucid technologies one.....but after that, it's still quantized at 16 bit. I don't know that I trust mixing to computer but then again, people track to it and i don't want to mixdown through the behringer thing wait could i use the sound card as a converter before the dat?? it wouldn't dither though would it... on another note, i have been off stereo bus compression for 3 months now and I don't think i am going back!!
 
Oh yeah... I have a burner so i could do what you say. Also, is cool edit pro a viable program with which to mixdown on computer?? I also have sonic foundry 4.5, wavelab, cakewalk Pro Audio 9...I really want a 1/2" machine. now i sleep............
 
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