Just recently I've been doing a fair bit of recording and editing and as I sold off most of the studio stuff when I left the studio I've been doing it either on a QU desk or via Reaper and a laptop. As good as Reaper is though I missed the simplicity and quickness of Protools plus the latency was pissing me off and I started to think about buying another audio interface that supported very low latency ....but then I had another idea.
Almost nothing has changed still I started recording bands 20 years ago. I'm still getting the same drums, bass, 2 guitars and vocal jobs I was back then. Why not use the same system then ? So I go digging in the shed and there sulking at the bottom of a pile of stuff is my old G4 which is stuffed full of Digidesign cards. A bit of digging around and I located the cable and an 882 in \ out interface and powered the thing up. Well it made a bit of a din as things were living in the fans and PSU but it booted into OSX and all was fine except the date \ time . Once I was satisfied it was a good to go I stripped it down and cleaned the fans and checked the caps in the PSU and cleaned out the internal fan in there.
It's hard to believe now but in the nineties these cards were about 10K each ... I didn't pay that as I brought them second hand but even then it was a few thousand for the cards and interfaces
So I fired up the 882 interface and started Protools and boom, back to the good old days of zero latency and TDM plugins. There are a couple of things that are a pain .... a G4 Mac is only USB 1.1 so moving filed via USB is painfully slow but a quick trip to Ebay and I scored a firewire 250Gb external drive for £15.00 ... so I can import files using the firewire 400 now
It won't run the latest plugins or virtual instruments but I don't actually need any of that and I won't Beat detective anyones drums or autotune anyone these days if they paid me too. I just want to record real bands that only need a bit of EQ and verb \ delay to spice up the tracking and this does it perfectly.
A quick look on Ebay shows you can score something like this for about £250 these days. It's a system that won't suit everybody but if you like a full DSP based recording solution rather than dickin around with buffer settings and such then you could do a lot worse than pick something like this up
www.2020studios.co.uk
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Spent days at a time pulling apart Nubus Macs, stuffing them full of Digidesign Cards and then building massive Seagate RAID towers to go with them...
Ahhhhh, happy days.. ish....
Listened to Offspring Americana today and it made me think - no way that album would sound the same if tracked today. The vocals are out of tune in loads of places (mains and harmonies), doubled vocal notes aren't the same length, some of the lead guitar lines are a bit out of tune with the rhythms... still one of my favourite albums for the energy of it.
I'm not anti edit but some stuff works better rawer. Also tuning and timing properly takes ages... there's no good alternative to doing it by hand one note at a time... quantise kills the feel of the delivery instantly.
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I have a 2009 MacBook Pro that is still going strong, with a new SSD and Ram upgrade it's pretty zippy now. For me it's worth keeping because it has so many ports (FireWire 800, USB, SD, Thunderbolt, Ethernet) and DVD-RW
The new machines are cool but just don't have the connectivity
@guitarfishbay I suppose after 5 years in 2020 studios polishing bad performances in terms of moving drum hits and tuning vocals I'm sick of it. All you end up with is something that can sound impressive immediately but has no lasting soul for repeated listens because your not really hearing anything human. I've kind of gone the other direction now and I don't care if the timing drifts or the singers a bit pitchy ... as long as they play as a band I can capture something real that's worth hearing.
The HD2 only started to suffer when I started using virtual instruments
After a few attempts with buying new systems, I only now have got a system that competes with it:
a 6900k with Pt12
quite laggy for monitoring of course, in comparison to the 15 year old DSP cards
The monitoring is just unbeatable ...
My plan is to try to gradually move over to the newer pc with USB rack IO, but there is a price to pay. If I was recording more seriously, I would not be so happy with the latency
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one of the reason it was so good was so many parts back in the day were hand coded to the metal no endless layers of api and stuff to make programming easy and join the dots.
stuff like photoshop 6 had all its filters written directly in assembler and some of those routines are way faster than the modern versions.
almost now want to find an old one for recording
I wouldn't go back but there were some things about HD that was great, esp the latency or lack thereof.
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I've had that for nearly 10 years, now... one of my best buys.
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