Looking for a 16 ch playback interface for a Windows machine

[S&L]

this is more of an aside than anything - the original poster is using a roland desk and obviously the big expense here is the desk - but I'm reading some very complicates solutions for a digital recording set up.

a while ago, I took an x32 out to a gig and recorded channels straight to an 'off the self' windows laptop using reaper - 20 odd channels recorded no problem at all and just a minute to switch over to the card inputs for play back, mix down the playback and master back to reaper.

we did the mixdown very fast - 30 minutes to an hour per song - because we were just interested in proving the viability of recording a live album this way. It all went swimmingly and we now have a commission to do a series of recordings for a live album.

 

We wondered whether we were going to run into problems with sync if we did a full studio recording, So we had a crack at that last week. now I'm sure there are other ways of patching but we recorded all of the drums (12 channels) then while playing back recorded channels, recorded each subsequent item one or 2 channels at a time, moving those recordings to the channel number we wanted them on, within reaper, after each 'take'. the whole process was straightforward, painless without any lag and without any need for any 3 party interface or a particularly flash PC.

recording costs for 80 hours in the studio...

one empty room (admittedly our room is already deadened)

one laptop I borrowed from my daughter

one usb cable

one x32 on hire at less than £100 ex vat for the week.

so what I'm saying is that digital recording is cheap, easy and doesn't need to be complex.

[Bobbsy]

Why wouldn't that be good practice? As long as the cable is properly terminated, that should be a perfectly acceptable solution imo. Fanout and distance limits are the only problems I can possibly foresee, but 10Base2 Ethernet networks use the same system with many more nodes, and at much larger distances.

 

 

 

 

If the equipment is self terminating the line will be over terminated. Some of the lower end gear does self terminate.

 

Mac

 

 

 

Fair point. I'm not well versed with using word clocks, but that seems like a rather short sighted design decision if you can't turn that off.

 

^^^^

 

What Mac said.

 

I agree that life would be much easier without some gear self terminating but I guess that at the low end there's an assumption that people won't be doing long chains of devices.

 

Higher end gear tends to either have switchable terminations or a proper in/out loop.

 

That said, wordclock seems fairly tolerant of "termination abuse", at least for smallish numbers of devices. I'd never advocate working this way...but it's worked reliably for me for many years.

[astrojgmoore]

How about something like the PreSonus StudioLive 16.0.2/16.4.2? I've used it's 24.4.2 brother as firewire outputs no problem before, and just take the stereo out of the StudioLive into the desk you want to mix on

[Stuart91]

Well, I've already got the Roland consoles, and the recording side works perfectly, it's just playback from the computer that I'm needing a solution for.

 

And ultimately I want to bring the tracks back into the Roland consoles, since I'm going to be trying to train up folks to use them.

 

Presonus could be handy as a stand-alone solution but is far more than I need at the moment.