Time to ditch the 002..

[Martin]

school studio, low budget (of course)..

it's time to ditch the 002 and go native with a new mac and PT10. I've been out of 'buying gear' land for a while and not sure what the current landscape is like. Current setup allows 16ch IN which is handy for bands.

Could anyone suggest a way of achieving this for a few thousand bucks, and hopefully improving on audio quality as well?

[Chris H]

For the school i work in, I have been using a firewire MOTU 896, currently costs around $1300 for 8 analogue in / out. For the extra 8 i add the be!@#$%^& ADA 8000, aprox $360, via lightpipe to the 896 as master. Works fine.
For my studio I use the Apogee Ensemble currently around $2,000 with the ADA 8000.

[walding]

IMHO the best bang for buck and the best sounding converters in that price range is RME.

Do you want PCIe or FW?

[Martin]

well, the new imacs are thunderbolt or lightninghope or whatever they call it

if that makes any different. Tell me i'll hear a difference with something newer/better and i'll be a happy person.

Also considering some older PT hardware (96 HD rig or whatever) as there isn't much need to anything fancypants just solid 16 channels that the rooms already setup for

[Manning]

Sadly it would seem a lot of other people are thinking the same way - I've been trying to buy some more 96 I/Os for ages, but no-one is selling them.

[audioio]

Also considering some older PT hardware (96 HD rig or whatever) as there isn't much need to anything fancypants just solid 16 channels that the rooms already setup for

I went this way. Managed to pick up a Magma chassis for <$200, the last model of 15" MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard port, a new Magma ExpressCard interface (at twice the cost of the chassis), three PT PCI cards (core, accel and process) for $400 and two 96IOs for $400 a piece. The 96IOs were from a fellow T'rocker.

I suppose I'm boasting a bit. I was staggered that no one else, here or on eBay, jumped on these. I haven't seen too many instances of prices like this, but maybe if HDX gains ground or Native rules supreme, this may be an indication of where the market is going.

Since Avid will likely junk HD support with v.11 I predict that, unless HDX takes off, used copies of HD10 will fetch a premium.

[Sammas]

Also considering some older PT hardware (96 HD rig or whatever) as there isn't much need to anything fancypants just solid 16 channels that the rooms already setup for

I went this way. Managed to pick up a Magma chassis for <$200, the last model of 15" MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard port, a new Magma ExpressCard interface (at twice the cost of the chassis), three PT PCI cards (core, accel and process) for $400 and two 96IOs for $400 a piece. The 96IOs were from a fellow T'rocker.

I suppose I'm boasting a bit. I was staggered that no one else, here or on eBay, jumped on these. I haven't seen too many instances of prices like this, but maybe if HDX gains ground or Native rules supreme, this may be an indication of where the market is going.

Since Avid will likely junk HD support with v.11 I predict that, unless HDX takes off, used copies of HD10 will fetch a premium.

I jumped to a used hd system as well. It's great! Outrageously more stable and predictable than any native system I have owned, particularly when it comes to inserting hardware effects.

I'm not so optimistic HD10 will be highly sought after with the release of PT11. The current code framework for HD is over a decade old. I am sure a large part of it was even used for protools mix systems. Compatibility breaking at PT11 is meant to mean a whole new program built from the ground up and lots of new(old) features like offline bounce, etc. I am predicting that PT11 will see a lot of HD10 users ditching there systems in favour of native ones to benefit from the new software.

I know I would. I use reaper currently to load VI's in protools because it allows me to address more than 4gb of ram. Even with cards full of processing, protools still cant do what reaper does in this regard. I also did a 4 hour VoiceOver session this morning that I did in reaper. Why? Because protools doesn't have offline bounce. When we are taking 2.5 hours of audio to be bounced... It is brutal! Sure you can consolidate the tracks then export them via the region bin but it still takes ages. Reaper bounced them at 43x real time speed. I was finished in about 8 minutes!

I love my HD system. Buy it for what it is. Very stable. Easy to use. Pretty cheap in this day and age... But it is old... And already has a bunch of cracks showing. On a side note, you can only use 8 channels on your HD interface via core audio... Another ridiculous limitation.

[Martin]

all really good info thanks guys, i might have a lead on a HD system so i'll investigate