compasspnt wrote on Thu, 27 October 2005 02:47 |
Please tell me another manufacturer's hardware/software product which would do the session I did last week:
*56 separate inputs, all recording at one time (48/24), mostly analogue sources, but needing the capability of changing input to AES at any time. XLR inputs preferred, but TT would work.
*56 separate outputs, all tracks playing back at one time. Mostly analogue outs, but AES capability required. XLR outs preferred, but TT would work.
*Many, many plug-ins running, both while recording, and on playback.
I know our PT rig can do it, because we did it. I think a MOTU might. Can anyone else provide such a system?
If it exists at a better price point, I'd like to know about it.
Roll it in, plug it into the XLR's, hit record...
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This has probably been answered a long time ago but I am slowly getting through this thread so here is one possible setup:
* 1 x quad dual-core AMD PC with the right ram and harddisk. This gives you enough power to run 200 tracks at 64 samples of latency and a bucket full of plugins. Cost? 6000 Euro.
* 2 x Sydec Mixpander cards ===> 128 inputs + 128 outputs in MADI/ADAT/TDIF/AES/EBU/AnalogueXLR or a mix of these. 18 DSP chips giving you 2x128 channel digital real-time mixer with
zero latency. Enough processing power to run 20 TC Reverbs, 120 dynamics processors (gate/expander/compressor/limiter), 600 bands of fully parametric EQ, 12 TC Dynamizers and 60 delay based effects simultaneously with
zero latency. Cost of these two cards + I/O?
5990 Euro.
My choice of DAW: (You could use Nuendo of course)
* Sonar 5 to give you full 64 bit floating point signal path (within the application) and many other advantages over PT like the universal buss architecture which beats Nuendo and ProTools routing. Cost? 500 Euro or less. (The Mixpander cards support ASIO, MME, WDM, GSIF2 and DWAVE so you can use any software with it. (Cubase/Nuendo/Sonar/SAW Studio whatever).
Cost so far?
12500 Euro. To put things into perspective, you need at least 4 192 I/O cards for the I/O for the above mentioned project. List price 16000$. An HD3 system is listed at 14000$ so that is allready
30000$ for PT and you need to factor in a PC.
As we have so much change left over compared to a PT rig, we can throw in a Magma box with a few PowerCores and UAD-1s into our setup for good measure and access to some nice plugins not available in native format. We can also throw in the entire Waves suite, the entire Voxengo suite, Algorithimx, URS and Sonalkis plugins.
This give you MUCH MORE processing power than any PT rig . If somehow this isn't enough, the quad dual core AMD can be expanded with 4 more dual-core processors on a daughter board. You can also add more mixpander cards. Imagine the upgrade path we are talking about...
All this talk of PDC reminds me that CakeWalk started implementing automatic plug-in delay compensation in '97. More than 8 years later and it still isn't in PT LE and isn't automatic in PT HD...
ProTools is very far from being the most powerfull solution at any price point let alone at a good price.
Alistair
(Slightly edited)