help please…
hi, im courrently thinking about purchasing the tascam fw 1082 to record a pretty much acoustic drums and send them to the pc via fireware… but i dont really understand how fireware works… does it send the outputs something like a track for kick drum, snare, etc, can someone help me with this and is this is the case of what a fireware mixer can what would you recomend buying.
thanks.
its called FIREWIRE,and its just an external connection to your PC. like PCI outside your PC. you just need a soundcard which has enough inputs for your drums. if you don`t have preamps, you can buy one with built in pres.
I like the Presonus FirePod. $500+ range… but nice. 8 ins.
My son has had great success with the Presonus FireBOX. If you need more I/O that that look at the FirePOD or the MOTU 828mkII or Traveler. I have heard good things about MOTU’s FireWire stuff. I have used a MOTU 24io which is a PCI based unit but it worked like champ. 24 tracks at 24/44.1 no pops, no glitches. Really nice piece of hardware.
D
I’ve been using a Motu828mkII for a year now. (Gateway XP laptop and a Glyph GT050 firewire drive.)
ZERO problems, excellent sound.
Presonus is releasing the firestation soon, but really i would by the E-MU 1820 M
MOTU 828 MKII
I’ve had one for about a year and a half, no troubles.
It’s got a total of ten inputs - two XLR (with phantom power) on the front and eight 1/4" line-level on the rear, which is exactly what I need to record my drummer’s kit:
1-kick
2-snare top
3-snare side
4-hat
5-tom1
6-tom2
7-tom3
8-tom4
9&10-overheads
thanks guys (y)
I use a Hercules FW 16/12 with a berry 2332fx-pro as mix preampage and monitoring - I check levels through ntrack, I don’t monitor through the interface.
It’s ok, haven’t seen a driver update for a year or so. I’d probably get something different, but you won’t get the channels per buck anywhere else.
I’ll second the firestation, that and the digimax FS and you’ll have 16 pretty nice preamps that’ll run at 96 Khz on a firewire bus.
BTW Daldopcn
Firewire is the nickname for Apple’s IEE1394 interface. It’s has a 6 pin powered plug or 4 pin unpowered. It runs at 400 Mega bits per second which is about 50 Mega Bytes per second. The PCI bus in your computer can do 133 Mega Bytes per second. So Firewire is not as fast as PCI (the slots you have to open your computer for) and can therefore not send/receive as quite as many tracks. It is sufficient for most people though. Yes, each track will be separate from the other tracks on the send, and the return to your soundcard. Firewire is hot swappable (you don’t have to turn off your computer to plug it in) and can be a good way to have a nice soundcard for a desktop OR a laptop.
Firewire 1394B is a newer version (only a couple cards on the market now) that runs at 800 Mbps or 100 MBps. You can therefore run even more tracks.
If you get a card without mic preamps, you’re going to need to get some if you wish to mic anything. Presonus has them built in. So do a few other. Some don’t and you need another piece of gear. Some cards include ADAT ports which is a 16 channel (8 in 8 out 24-bit 48khz-SMUX uses two cables for 96khz ability) fiber optic cable. So you might have 8 analogue ins and outs and another 8 digital ADAT ins and outs for 16. Some also include S/PDIF (96khz stereo in/out digital) as well but most do not allow you to use the S/PDIF AND the ADAT at the same time, some do though.
to use an ADAT input on a soundcard with a mic, you need either a preamp with an ADAT output built in (behringer ADA8000, M-Audio Octane, etc) or a preamp AND a A/D converter with and ADAT output. Same with S/PDIF (Art DPS, etc…).
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| The PCI bus in your computer can do 133 Mega Bytes per second. So Firewire is not as fast as PCI (the slots you have to open your computer for) and can therefore not send/receive as quite as many tracks. |
Yeah, but a single mono 24/96 requires what, 20meg per minute? It’s peanuts compared to the throughput of either firewire or PCI, and plenty of firewire devices can record 16 tracks at once with or without adat expansion (although it’s it more common than 16 in a single interface) where buffer settings come into play.
WinXP doesn’t support 1394b properly yet under SP2 without a hotfix either.