The best piece of equipment I bought in 2002 (Gold Star for the Alesis Masterlink)

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Vurt

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For the past year or two I've been transferring tracks to Wavelab and then burning to a Sony Spressa CD burner. Last week I bought an Alesis Masterlink and feel like someone just lifted the shades and let the light shine in.

I know the Masterlink has been given high praise in quite a few threads around here, but it deserves more, and anyone with the "dull" CD blues deserves a CD that plays music as clearly as it sounded in your monitors. I thought for a long time that I was just using poor mic placement and needed to EQ everything, but that wasn't the case at all. Once I realized that is when I started looking into a new burner. I burned 5 songs over the weekend with the ML, each with no EQ at all, and they sound fantastic. No dull sheen over the mixes at all.

Thanks to everyone who recommended it...
 
Best piece of equipment I bought in 2002...... ROLAND 3080 sound module.

Best piece of equipment I bought in 2001 ..... Yamaha AW4416
 
Yo Best Buy Vurt:

You have just made the "BEAR" smile broadly.

I guess I can say my Yam 2816 is the best piece of gear I bought in 2001-02.

I was going to buy a Masterlink but when I looked at my MD8 as being the source I figured I could use a better source.

The 2816 burns very good CD's. I expect to get better as I become more familiar with all of the choices on the unit.

What's next? I suspect DVD @24 bit with CD burning? There is always something better coming down the pike or there would be no more fishing.

Green Hornet:D :p :p :cool:
 
me likes that Masterlink thing-a-mah-bob
also. it's nice to adjust your settings and then just "walk" away from it while it does all the work,..freeing up your computer or DAW for you to lay down tracks for the next multi-platinum selling bagpipe-music cd.:D

Yo U.S.S. Hornet, glad that Yammie still suits you. great unit. p.s. make sure you are using AT LEAST "20 lb test" line when you are fishing for that pike. cheers.

:cool:
 
What does the masterlink do for cd burning that any other burner cant?

when you say without eq i assume you mean you didnt master it on the masterlink
 
oo yeah, Mackie hr824s were my best purchase
 
KingstonRock said:
What does the masterlink do for cd burning that any other burner cant?

when you say without eq i assume you mean you didnt master it on the masterlink
Click to expand...
It's not a "burner" -- it's a hi-res mixdown unit that also happens to be able to burn Redbook Audio CDs...!
 
glad someone liked their masterlink...

I liked mine, but it blew up one day for no reason - and I don't know where to ship it yet to get it fixed....could ship it back to Alesis, but they'l take a year to do...

I can also pay $400 for a cheapo computer and $400 for the Final Mix plug-in on my D8B and get almost the same thing.

RB
 
I need to get one of those bad boys. Then I will be completely DAWless. I'll still have one if I want it but dammnit I will be a slave to the man no longer!!!
 
Yep, the Masterlink is one of those things that I wonder how I got along before I had it, but I didn't buy it in 2002, so my best buy of 2002 award (excepting microphones) is the Apogee Mini-Me. Check one of these puppies out! Great: mic pres, converters, soft-limit & compression... and it has a USB out (which will operate at a separate bit depth/sample rate than the digital audio outs!!). Friggin amazing.

Scott
 
My best for the year was the Aardvark Q10/UAD-1/Grace 101 Pre...next year maybe a Masterlink...Wavelab no good or what?

limited
 
2003 - Hopefully a house for me and my wife!
2002 - A Larrivee OM03R, one sweet guitar!
Honorable mention goes to my pair of ECM8000s
2001 - Soundelux U97
2000 - Great River MP2, Delta 44, KM184 (I was crazy this year!)

Hope everyone is enjoying the snow on the east coast!
 
limited said:
...Wavelab no good or what?
Click to expand...

Wavelab is good and was working fine for me, but I was noticing significant quality loss on CDs I burned from my Sony Spressa. I spent months trying figure out the problem with the help of my local pro store, and damned if even they could explain it in the end. Finally I said "fuck it - it's gotta be the Spressa" (which, by the way, is no cheap consumer burner).

As much as I liked Wavelab, I don't miss it at all. I think the compression and limiting on the ML are better, and the whole process is just simpler. And like Tex - I don't like using my PC for music. I've slowly gotten further and further from it over the past two years, and now they're totally separate. Life is good.
 
sunn all tube halfstack $100 used.


Im curious what can the Masterlink do that my computer doesnt allready do, and how do you load your plugins to it?:rolleyes:
 
Switching from Folgers to Hills Bros.


Other than that, I'd have to say upgrading to 1 Gig SyncDRAM and 160 GB of storage. Much less mixing down time. Faster porn downloads, etc.

Then there's the 15 or so odd industrial piping insulation tubes that I made in to bass traps. Nothing like tighter, more accurate bass in the room before it even hits the mic or your ears.
 
darrin_h2000 said:
Im curious what can the Masterlink do that my computer doesnt allready do, and how do you load your plugins to it?:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I suppose it is doing for me what your pc is doing for you - the way I want to do it. I don't like plugins, save for a few I have and actually like. Make that a couple. I prefer to actually plug in outboard boxes that I can get my hands on, and in my opinion, sound better 9 times out of 10.
 
so what does this masterlink do? Its just for loading your recorded a mixed tracks into, for you to burn and do some final mastering effects on?

or its a daw, and your record everything onto it directly, and mix on it?
 
The Masterlink is a hi-res mixdown unit, with some onboard DSP for post-mix processing -- not a replacement for a mastering house, but at least the DSP is usable, unlike a lot of so-called "mastering" plug-ins - especially budget ones......
 
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