18 Apr
2010
18 Apr
'10
1:22 p.m.
On 04/14/2010 02:56 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Rick Green
<rtg(a)aapsc.com> wrote:
MA lighting (the guys who sell the grand ma range of light controllers,
market leaders in germany) have a warning note on their boxen (which are
embedded pcs in effect) not to attempt disk backups in high-noise
conditions, because the vibrations can cause failure or even data
corruption. very funny. even more funny: they're right. i've heard quite
a few lighting engineers got bitten by this issue.
Last weekend, I was running FOH for a couple of
concerts, and the artist
had hired a professional recording engineer to lay down a multitrack of
the show for possible commercial release. THey had a few 'special
surprise guests' showing up, so I kept bringging out 'just one more'
microphone until the channel count was up to 22, I think. After sound
check, the recording engineer expressed some trepidation that his
external hard drive could handle all that bandwidth. I asked him if he
had pushed record and tried it during soundcheck, and he said "Of course,
but you know when they get excited and start playing loud during the show,
it fills up those bits pretty quick, and maybe then the firewire800 won't
be fast enough."
good story.
what's ironic though is that its now reasonably well documented that
if the disk drive is in the line of fire when they start to play loud,
it really will be unable to keep up. this has nothing to do with bit
rates, but is (probably) caused by the the vibrations causing read
failures which necessitate a lot of retrys, thus slowing down the
effective streaming bandwidth of the disk. if the disk is kept out the
way of direct incoming sound, the issue goes away.