Very well put drbam.
I use both Sony and Digi why not have your cake and eat it too?
Sony's software works VERY well on Digi TDM, 002, 001 and MBox hardware.

George Ware

NICE. "Sony's software works VERY well on Digi TDM, 002, 001 and MBox hardware." That is what I was REALLY interested in. I love my options for DX effects, and really wanna keep em for the most part! haha.

Thanks guys, i'll post over there.

Why is this about converters?
Sounds like you should describe a session from setup and usuage to mixdown and get tips from some people here and many other rec sites out there now.

You're using a PC and unless you're talking switching to a mac and PT HD system, I see no reason to move from your Q10 (or layla, delta 1010, motu, etc.).
I would seriously suspect your preamps, mics, and usage (placement, mixing).
I wouldn't put "converters" at the top of the concern list with the Q10 (or others mentioned above), I think the digi low-ends (001/002/mbox) sound the same if not worse.
But the largest concern - I and way too many others also think the PC drivers for both the 001 and 002 stink (grab the dice, shooter out).
You will NOT hear this in the PT forum of course.

If we're talking PT HD, then we see a marked difference in operation, sound (to a degree), setup, and functionality.
The price is your hurdle there, but how about need? Without the IMPORTANT focus on pre's, mics, and usuage...that PT HD system won't mean squat.

You're talking about a "sound" difference and I'm only being honest in saying I highly doubt it lies in your Q10/converters choice right now...but moreso in the more important pre,mic, and USAGE department. Don't forget the artists competancy/capabilities factor and knowing the basics of how to mix the genre they're aiming for.

How's your mic bin? Whattya got there?
You have any decent pre's?
Check out the Trident S20 pre. I got one for around $999.00 at GC. Budget?...that little RNP dual (FMR audio) offers some nice bang for the buck ($400 or so).
Any outboard gear (compression/limiting/verbs)?
How's your signal path and cabling? How's your recording room? (live?, dead? non-existant?)

Then your mixdown stage (more usage) plays a large role. I've seen and heard many mix some gorgeous stuff with just simple old mackie mixer pre's, waves platinums, and decent mics...it was a combo of a decent room, mic placement, and time and care in the mixdown dept. Never once is the converter questioned.

Jaydeeee is right(!) Especially about the preamps. One of the very most important links in the chain and probably the most neglected.

If I had $1000 to spend on a preamp and a soundcard I’d spend $100 on the soundcard and $900 on the preamp.

I don’t think the RNP is as good as the RNC but it is still a good budget option.

Depending on your taste I think you could pick up a little API for around $600 - $700...That would start pointing you towards the nice end of town.

Also the instruments themselves might just sound dank, and in the hands of a musician who's own skills are dank, that's like double dankness dude, and really makes alot of folks stratch their heads in wonderment, ussually followed by lots of jacking off in the 'gear' department in and around GC and musiciansfriend... what does moist pro mean again? (seriously, anyone remember?)

moving into a new place and right away I gotta record in PTHD...

worse

ON A MAC!!!!

shoot me now!!!!!!

The fact that its hooked up to a SSL AWS900 makes it a bit more palatable, but only a bit

Look on the bright side, learning new ways brings a much more versitile toolset to your already awesome arsenal. It's like that gun in Beverly Hills Cop that has a microwave in it, who wouldn't want that shit?

"The fact that its hooked up to a SSL AWS900 makes it a bit more palatable"

Gee, ya think?

Is that in your new home? Lucky you!

Strange story. Long long ago, I worked at the only studio in town with an Augsperger room. Wonderful rooms,unreal gear. We bought and restored then sold tons of Neve's, Tridents and other goodies, had a matched quartet of M-49's, all sorts of tape recorders, 3 studer 827's once, Ampex master munchers, anything you could think of when it came to analog gear, plus the digital formats from Soy and Mitsubishi. My pay was never right there, at the end, just hoping for 60 bucks a week stipend, that didnt even get paid. Horrible story, but anyway

Some one else bought it a while after I left, tore out the Augsperger room and replaced it with Auralex!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

like someone kicking you in the nuts!

Then in all the rooms they varnished and glued the floor, locking down the hinged cable troughs, all sorts of stupid things. Needless to say they failed and had to sell the place to someone else

Now this someone else has a ton of money and no qualms about losing it. They brought in me and my partner and we are putting it back together. We are working as they bring in gear.

Both control rooms have maxed out PTHD rigs, but no patchbays yet, cables are running across the floor, everything in travel racks right now. One SSL AWS900 is in place. After we get this room back up to snuff, I will work on "my " room. In addition to its PTHD attrocity, it will be getting another AWS900 that I will be testing with vegas.

Vegas WILL be in my room. With the availability of AVTransfer, I can go from vegas to PT no problem. I am going to ask Sony for some extra help here to make sure Vegas can hold its own against the other equipment, as this place is WAY high profile. Getting the AWS to work with vegas is my main concern right now.

Exciting times!

Sounds awesome and fun! Hopefully the rooms weren't too badly destroyed.

I'd love to know how things work out with the SSL and Vegas; and, how the transfers go between PTHD and Vegas. I assume you are talking about the V6 AAF and BWF format transfer to and from PTHD.

Damn - I just noticed there are a lot of letter abbreviations in this post!

Oh, and if you get the rooms sounding anywhere near their former glory, maybe you can impulse some of them!

ahh they were impulsed before I left the first time ( along with a lot of the old gear there) and can be found under AES_24_96 or pipelineaudio at www.noisevault.com

An alternate software for transfer between ProTools and Vegas os EDl Convert from Cui Bono - Soft. It converts EDLs from most popular DAWs as well as OMF. You can do direct converts between Vegas and ProTools (version 5), Audition (and Cooledit) Sadie to mention only a few. It costs siginificantly less than AVTransfer.

I haven't had the opportunity to try Vegas on PT LE hardware like the 002 or Mbox. I generally use PTHD hardware in the studios I work for and Vegas in my home studio. If Vegas does work with the 002R it gives me another reason to buy it.... damn my bank balance will never stay in the black LOL!!!!

Vegas does work somewhat with the 002, using the 002's ASIO driver, however the asio driver is pretty sketchy, and disappears whenever it feels like it, causing you to reboot all the time

run on sentence of the week

Yikes.
I wouldn't even give an 002 to my enemy, much less make him use LE. Digi's frantic foray into the proj studio market....only they forgot how to use a condom.
Golden rule: PTHD on mac if you must or choose PT.

"I wouldn't even give an 002 to my enemy, much less make him use LE. Digi's frantic foray into the proj studio market....only they forgot how to use a condom.
Golden rule: PTHD on mac if you must or choose PT"

My day job is professional Audio Post for film and television... I mostly use ProTools HD (TDM) systems and have just today finished a half hour doco, with about 10 minutes of mute original WW1 and Korean War footage to which I had to lay full SFX. All this was tracked and mixed on ProTools D-Control ICON console which Digidesigna and AVID won't even install on the Mac platform. In fact the studios where I did this, in two 8 hour shifts, has five Icon consoles, which were retrofitted in between October and December last year. They had to change all their 18 month old dual CPU G4s for HP dual Xeons running XP. Yeah ProTools on a Mac used to be the standard but now it's PCs first from Digidesign because Apple keeps changing OSX (anyone for a Tiger) As for the 002 I completed a month of childrens television for Disney (Australia) in March all mixed for broadcast TV on a 002 running off a Mac.
I love the look of PT on a Mac, the Windows versions look grungier on the same 19" Samsung LCD monitors that were attached to Macs until last December where I was mixing today . In the end though it tends to work exactly the same way on both systems.... and crashes equally as often.
I use my Mackie Control with Vegas at home for corporates and love Vegas to death but if you are serious about audio then, for better or worse, ProTools is the defacto industry standard from TV to Feature films and I come from a background of film, multitacks, Audiofiles and Fairlights not to mention twenty six years of professional sound editing/design and mixing experience.

calling it an industry standard is a self defeating attitude

Brittney Spears is an industry standard is she not? She sells gazzillions of albums. Is that the standard we should hold our audio to? With EDL convert pro or AVtransfer vegas is compatiable with Alsihad.

Any of these pile of crap "mastering mafia" mastering engineers that want stem mixes in PT can suck the left half of my right nut. I did not ask them to remix the album and will gladly provide them with raw wave or sd2 files in case they need to turn the vocals up or down, but stems? come on

Since PT is the Mix magazine/ Conservatory of Recording arts/ Digidesign unholy trinity of audio destruction standard, and has been for at least five years, then answer me this:
Out of any randomly grabbed 100 albums made in the last 5 years, can you even pick up THREE that sound at all decent? Honestly. If this is the standard, I sure as hell want no part of it.

XLR is a standard, I can live with that. But calling constantly changing software used mostly by recording school graduates, using all sorts of nasty monopoly practices, I dont think thats any sort of standard to hold up.

So now here I am surrounded by 3 maxxed out PTHD Accel rigs, being forced to use one of them for some label projects and dying at just how pathetic the editing on "the standard " is. It is almost unuseably slow.

As soon as the managers go back to LA, I will AVTransfer the recordings to Vegas and start blasting away

>>>My day job is professional Audio Post for film and television... I<<<

Not sure why you quoted my reply, as your reply doesn't relate.
I'm talking about the pointless 001,002s - and most of that pertains to driver issues. But in respect to your post, I still would recomend a mac based PTHD at this point (again, PC driver based response).

I'm not sure why Pipeline is freaking out with having to use a PTHD system, in fact if your really serious and desire to be flexible (more work) you should learn every system you can. The goal is to capture the artists work (or your own if this be the case) in the best light possible and/or work with the artist in enhancing the whole project - that's about it.

wow guys, I thought this thread was dead a week and half ago, just checked the forum again for any new good posts, and here is mine at the top! haha.

Anywho, since then I've really "rethunk" everything. I got to hear some more mixes other people have made on Q10's 002's, etc. I start to think that the case IS that my converters are pretty much what I paid for - and along that line, will be pretty much the same with all this price range gear.

which brings me to the next thing to buy.
first of all, it is my understanding that you cannot BYPASS the Q10 pre's. You can turn them to 0 db gain, but they are still ran through there automatically. Not that this is bad, but it WILL have an effect on the sound none the less - correct?

my gear list is here:
www.shackrockrecordings.com/recording.shtml (as are a couple pictures, etc.)

as you can see, it's definately a home studio, in the basement at that. Nothing special about the room except carpet on the walls.

At most I have about $500 to spend. Here's my options:

*I'm looking into a few decent mics for micing tom drums (my sm57's on those guys aren't cutting it...).
*a dual channel pre (basically, 2 channels is fine....)
*an upgrade from my SP C1 for vocals, (mainly, a deeper/richer vocal sound, esp. for rap vocals).

any suggestions are welcomed. Been looking a lot at the AT 30/40 series...and a few shures.

lastly, anyone know how the Q10 pre's compare to some other pre's? I got a DMP2 already as you can see from my list, maybe I'll start using that on more instruments...

"The goal is to capture the artists work (or your own if this be the case) in the best light possible and/or work with the artist in enhancing the whole project - that's about it."

which is exactly why I am freaking out. I have nothing against learning new stuff, and I do so everyday, constantly. However as a PT user since the Sample Cell days, I have never seen it improve audio editing wise to the point where it could even begin to keep up with Vegas. It does nothing but hurt the vibe of the project to run so slow. It goes without saying we certainly wont be mixing in PT, as we have consoles available and even the artists are scared of the summing issues they hear about in PT

>>>Anywho, since then I've really "rethunk" everything. I got to hear some more mixes other people have made on Q10's 002's, etc. I start to think that the case IS that my converters are pretty much what I paid for <<<

>>>At most I have about $500 to spend. Here's my options:<<<

(cough)
Yep, it's the converters.
It's not the fact you're missing decent pre's, mics, and experience. It couldn't be the fact you're only allotting $500.00 to "fix the problem".

Another idea: Take that $500 and donate it to charity.
I think it might be the best route for you at this point.

wow, thanks great advice, or wait, not.

seriously, for being 19 and having a little home studio, and being in school, $500 is a lot of money. for most people, that's a huge amount of money.

anyone who really wants to help out?

>>anyone who really wants to help out?<<

Bottom line is that good converters are going to cost you. There are no if's, and's or but's and no "workarounds." Few things are black and white but I think this is one of them. So my advice is to open a bank account specifically for this purchase and deposit something every week, even if you have to skip a meal. Or you can find a way to go into serious debt – credit cards are perfect for this and the CC companies love to give cards to students.

drbam