Topic: Home Recording Hardware (need help)

[TNJazz]

TNJazz, the current quote on the Saffire Pro 26 is $669.

So which do you think is better (in terms of quality, I am just listing cost for reference)
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/Focusrite-Saffire-Pro-26-IO?sku=241135 Saffire Pro $669
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/product/PreSonus-Firestudio-26x26-Firewire-Recording-System?sku=241848 PreSonus FireStudio $590

(I linked both, so anyone with input please chime in)

I think they're both about the same.  We've owned a Saffire in the past and were fairly pleased with it.  Only sold it because we moved to hard disk location recording and got rid of all the laptop based gear.

We do still own and use Presonus gear, and I think it's an excellent bang for the buck.

You might also consider Cleantone's MOTU 896 as well, although it's a 2 rackspace unit.  Pretty robust though, and certainly a big step up from the MOTU 828 series.

[bluevolvo]

I used to use the AES on two units all the time making 20 channels via one firewire400 line.

could you elaborate on your sample rate and bit depth?

[cleantone]

could you elaborate on your sample rate and bit depth?

Well it depends on your computer. Your RAM, hard drive speed, processor speed and bus speeds will dictate the effectiveness.

I used to roll 24bit 44.1khz. 20 channels for a couple of hours without choking on a TiBook 800mhz g4 with a gig of ram. To external and internal hard drives. I am not sure what happened to the rig but after a few years it got unreliable. Maybe the OS upgrades? OS9 always ran awesome. It was the computer though for sure. Not the hardware. From what I gather this thread is not about recording live concerts anyway. I upgrades and now I use only one unit at a time for playback one my Mac. Firewire out to MOTU 896> out the mains (or AES) to my monitors. I don't have much need to use them for recording. This means I don't have too much need for more than one unit. Someday I might want to go above 24 inputs (new rig) and clock an 896 for additional channels. If and when I don't think I will need more than 10 more channels and if I do I don't want to use the laptop anyway.

[Merton]

Okay now I have a new question:

Will any of these systems benefit from having a firewire pci-express card that can handle up to 800mb/s (opposed to 400mb/s)?

I have one in my system now, and of course it would be great to run it at 800mb/s.

[TNJazz]

Okay now I have a new question:

Will any of these systems benefit from having a firewire pci-express card that can handle up to 800mb/s (opposed to 400mb/s)?

I have one in my system now, and of course it would be great to run it at 800mb/s.

Not really.  All of them are Firewire 400.  I believe the only unit on the market at the moment with built in FW800 ports is the RME Fireface 800.

FW400 is more than enough though.

[bluevolvo]

I used to roll 24bit 44.1khz. 20 channels for a couple of hours without choking on a TiBook 800mhz g4 with a gig of ram. To external and internal hard drives.

thx, i guess that's were i was trying to skip to when i said horsepower originally.  a bottleneck is definately going to be getting the data out to the drives (also why i said driveS)

i somehow manage to run my traveler pretty well on a windows base, but i also don't care about recording above 44 unless it's going to video

the motu's definately seem to like macs better.

[Krispy D]

the motu's definately seem to like macs better.

they just have good taste 

[Merton]

I used to roll 24bit 44.1khz. 20 channels for a couple of hours without choking on a TiBook 800mhz g4 with a gig of ram. To external and internal hard drives.

thx, i guess that's were i was trying to skip to when i said horsepower originally.  a bottleneck is definately going to be getting the data out to the drives (also why i said driveS)

i somehow manage to run my traveler pretty well on a windows base, but i also don't care about recording above 44 unless it's going to video

the motu's definately seem to like macs better.

I will have a ton of horse power. I am a computer science major, and I am in the research field of multi-threaded, multi-core software development.

My new system will either have a 3ghz quad core processor, or two 3ghz quad core processors (8 cores total). I will also be putting in a MINIMUM of 2gigs of ram.

My CURRENT system:
Athlon FX-55 2.7gHz (overclocked)
2 gigs of Corsair ram
2 200gb harddrives running in raid 0 (this means both drives work together to processes something, which decreases the amount of time it takes to read and write to harddrive (aka they are faster)