Comments

snicholshms wrote on 3/7/2005, 11:26 PM
THAT's a VERY subjective question...here's my 2 cents. I just bought a Presonus Firepod firewire "Recording Studio"...and it works great! 8 very good mic preamps and a very low noise floor for clear, clean recordings.
It's mounted in a 6 U SKB-x roll rack with wheels.
The laptop has a 60 GB 7200 RPM HDD and I plug a LaCie 7200 RPM Firewire HDD into the Firepod and the Firepod into the laptop. No HDD noise when recording, either. The Firepod has two Firewire ports...one to the laptop the other to the HDD.
It's also very portable.
sstillwell wrote on 3/10/2005, 6:57 AM
Also the MOTU 828mkII works VERY well. I use it for exactly that...live recording with a laptop. It also has a ADAT lightpipe input so that you can add another 8 channels of inputs/outputs. With that one "card" (it's actually Firewire) and an 8-channel lightpipe converter (like the Behringer ADA8000...not bad for the money) you can have up to 18 analog inputs at one time.

I did a 3-hour session for a symphony orchestra recently...only 5 tracks at 44.1k, 24 bit, but I just punched "record" and let it roll for the entire session...not a single snap, crackle or pop. And that was to the internal (slow) hard drive!!!

Scott
RickZ wrote on 3/10/2005, 3:27 PM
I've had good luck with a Sony 'notebook' that has what Sony calls ILink, which is a 4 pin firewire port to connect to an external drive, and RME HDSP Cardbus to Multiface box. ASIO driver. I use Benchmarkmedia AD2k portable A/D on S/PDIF input, and other 3 channels analog in to Multiface. Per recommendation of Benchmark, I set Multiface as Master clock, send S/PDIF output to Benchmark input, and Benchmark output to Multiface input. This box also has an ADAT Optical input. www.rme-audio.com

Rgds,
Rick Z