Will this work?????

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lostinopinions
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Lostinopinions

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I record both live and Studio music for my church. I have an A & H gl2200 24 ch mixer and I will be purchasing an HD24 within the next week or so. I will be recording 12 to 16 tracks to the HD24, then mixing down through the A & H to a DAW for most of the stuff. But when we produce CD's I was planning on downloading the individual tracks from the HD24 to my DAW and using Cubase or Sonar to apply effects to individual vocals and instruments because I have no Hardware effects.
Does this seem like it will work?

Is there something I am Missing?

Any recommendations?
 
What DAW are you referring to?

I will be purchasing this next week. I posted this setup in the Computers & Soundcard forum and didn't hear to much back.

Evercase 10 - Bay
ABIT BH7 Intel 845pe chipset Mother board
ABIT Siluro 64MB Video Card
Maxtor 120GB 7200 Rpm 8MB Cache
Plextor 48X24X48 CD-RW
Enermax 350W Power Supply
Intel P4 2.4 GHz 533 FSB Northwood
1 GB Kingston Hyper X DDR333

Any Suggestions?
 
Lost,

Its good to see someone else out there getting into the church recording gig. Sounds like you've got some budget to work with and you're headed in a good direction. I just picked up a Mackie MDR 24/96 this week for $900 so I can ditch my ADATs, which have been good workhorses, but tape is a hassle that I'm looking forward to being rid of, and I really need more than 16 tracks for what I've been working on.

As far as transferring tracks to your DAW you might want to invest in the Alesis Fireport (I think that's the name), which should allow for much faster transfers than the ethernet link. It is about $200 and allows you to pull the drive bay out of the HD24 and plug it in, then transfer your data via firewire (IEEE 1394) to your PC. There are a few guys here who have posted good reviews of this process.

I'm not an expert on PC components, but I'd love to have that much horsepower to do exactly the same thing you're trying to do. I'm not too sure about the Echo Mia. A lot of people have been raving about the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 as a rock-solid audio card. Also, does the video card support dual monitors? From what I've read, Sonar is really slick with a dual monitor setup.

Good luck with it.

Darryl.....
 
Yep...Although i use a fozzie D-1624 and a scsi jaz transfer its slower than the fireport but still gets the job done at prob 1/4 of the cost.
 
Re: What DAW are you referring to?

Lostinopinions said:
I will be purchasing this next week. I posted this setup in the Computers & Soundcard forum and didn't hear to much back.

Evercase 10 - Bay
ABIT BH7 Intel 845pe chipset Mother board
ABIT Siluro 64MB Video Card
Maxtor 120GB 7200 Rpm 8MB Cache
Plextor 48X24X48 CD-RW
Enermax 350W Power Supply
Intel P4 2.4 GHz 533 FSB Northwood
1 GB Kingston Hyper X DDR333

Any Suggestions?
Click to expand...

I haven't heard the greatest things about the 800 series chipset's (Intel) for DAW use. Not saying it won't work, but if you are running into problems, that will be the first place to start looking.

I would use NOTHING BUT Matrox video cards with the GeForce MMX 4 chipset! Anything else, you may again have some problems.

You WILL need a second hard drive. Trying to run your OS, audio applications, and streaming that many tracks of audio on one drive is going to disappoint you immensely. Get a smaller drive to put your OS and applications on and save that 120GB drive for your audio.

I doubt you need that much RAM. 512 will be just fine. I use 256 on my home machine, and the difference between that and the 1GB we have at the studio is zilch! 512 is MORE THAN ENOUGH RAM for a DAW, unless you plan on keeping open say, Sonar, Wavelab, Fruity Loops, ACID, Excel, and a slew of other apps all at once. Your audio app's will NOT benefit for more RAM than 512 in ANY case. Use the money you save on RAM to get a second hard drive, or to even get a faster CPU. DON'T waste it on RAM that you will NEVER use. Trust me, you will NEVER use that much RAM doing what you want to do. Kingston is quality RAM, you are good to go there.

I would up the power supply to 400 watts. While 350 seems like more than enough, with a DAW, STABILITY is important, and having MORE THAN ENOUGH "headroom" on the power supply is desireable. Make sure it is of course Enermax and rated for P4's.

A little "aside" thing here. I run Windows 2000 at home, and XP Pro at the studio (the studio owner actually BOUGHT XP Pro...sigh......). I see NO difference between them in terms of stability and the way the software functions. However, I see a BIG difference in the ease of installing these two OS's and configuring them. 2000 blows away XP Pro when it comes to installing and configuring them. Save yourself a little hassle and use 2000. If you insist on using XP Pro, well, make sure you spend the extra 2 hours or so during the configuring part and disable all the crap it makes run by default and get rid of that sorry ass "look" it has with all the funny looking icons and what not.

The advice about getting the Fireport for the HD24 may or may not be good for you. Do you have an extra $250 or a LOT of time? The 10T base ethernet on the HD24 is weird. I can't imagine that it would have cost that much more to put in a 100T, but they didn't, and the 10T is SLOW SLOW SLOW...but not too bad if you have other things to do. For a 4 minute song, expect each 24 bit 48KHz track to take about 1:15 to upload via the 10T ethernet. Over 24 tracks, that is like 30 minutes per song.

While we haven't had any problem YET with our HD24 that we have had for over a year and a half now, I AM seeing a disturbing trend of various problems with them. This is typical Alesis MO: The product starts out being very reliable but a year later the units being made seem to start having problems right out of the box. Given Alesis's track record on these things, you have about a 70/30 chance of your unit not having problems when you get it. Buyer beware!

Good luck.

Ed
 
Another option to look into would be an adat card (like the Frontier Dakota or others) to transfer 16 or more chanels at once into the DAW. If the HDR's D/A's can recieve from an external adat source, the DAW could then be the final playback device. (I say 'if' simply because I don't know the HDR, but used to do this with adats.) It would possibly save you another transfer back and you might find even more millage in the DAW mix/processing options.
Wayne
 
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