28 May
2008
28 May
'08
2:31 p.m.
Mark Knecht wrote:
On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 9:06 AM, Pieter Palmers
<pieterp(a)joow.be> wrote:
<SNIP>
Or if money is an issue right now he could buy a nice Presouns 8
channel unit, make sure he likes it, and then add more 8 channel units
later. Use an external clock generator to sync them and he's in fat
city. If one unit goes down, power supply dies, XLR connector goes
bad, he can get it fixed but he still has 16 channels.
You don't even need
external sync with the presonus units. They can sync
to firewire.
Sounds
great, but where can I find a firewire interface that will let me
record 24+ tracks at once. I am in the market for one if my pocket can handle
the cost... (This is in no way related to to USB comparison...)
There are none
that have 24 preamps. However, there are plenty that can
handle +24 channels with the use of external preamps. The magic number
seems to be "26", being "8 preamps, 2x ADAT, 1x spdif". Then there
are
some devices that provide 4x/4x ADAT I/O.
I'm only going to give one device name since that's the only one on our
supported device list: Focusrite Saffire PRO26.
To get a more broad overview of the market I would suggest you look at
the offerings from TC Electronic, Presonus and M-Audio too if you look
for something like this. I can name at least 5 devices that do 24channel
(spdif doesn't count for me) I/O if you have 16channels of external
preamp. All at 48k of course.
Greets,
Pieter
Just an idea,
Mark
P.S. - I didn't understand your comment earlier about a globally
available 1394b clock. I worked on that spec and I just don't remember
that. Been too long I suppose...
I'm talking about the Cycle Timer Register that is globally available to
all nodes. It's incremented by the cycle master at 24.576MHz, and all
nodes have (approximately) the same view of this clock. All audio
samples transported on the 1394 bus are timestamped relative to this
cycle timer. This means that every sample has an "absolute" time
attached, no matter what device it is sent to. This enables the use of
multiple devices, like you suggest, without any form of external sync.
It even beats wordclock sync since that only ensures relative sync (same
rate), but still leaves an ambiguity in the exact absolute time a sample
should have.
I hope that refreshes things a bit :).
Greets,
Pieter