[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

wrote:

Hi there audio pros.

This is a bit of an enquiry, bit of a rant.

OK, everybody gets a few seconds rant time sometimes, perhaps. Basically
you're ranting at the demise of firewire, do be aware that there is a long
queue to do that. Because of this I'll leave a lot uncommented. My route to
multitrack recording is a multitrack recorder. Partly because I am a luddite
and partly because I know my pc's because taming those is my daytime job.

I am your typical
musician/home studio recordist so I do my recording on a PC using mid
priced / low end hardware. It seems at first glance that my sort are
well catered for these days with a plethora of cheap USB and firewire
interfaces, but I really struggle to find one that meets my needs,
and it leaves me wondering who they are designed for.

Firstly, they all seem to top out at 8 XLR mic inputs. This seems a
bizarre number to me.

For track builders and - probably unintentionally - for real recordists
recording classical music that is all you really seem to need. It is
difficult to need more than 8 channels for that, but probably doable if you
have enough singing wimmen.

My recording sessions fall into one of two
categories: either layering/building/overdubbing in which case one
would be enough; or recording my entire band in which case the horn
section and vocals alone use up 6 of those 8 before I've even thought
about the drums. So 8 xlrs seems right in the middle of the two ends
of usefulness, too many for solo recording but just not quite enough
for the band.

Then there's the monitoring. The interfaces I've seen tend to have an
input level control and then some overall balance pot between live
and playback sound. I find this fairly useless

Yes, you either need a recorder-mixer or a real mixer.

Now I did find one piece of kit that answered all my problems and
still falls into the price category I'm working in: Phonic Helixboard
24. Stop laughing at the back - I know this thing has a poor rep in
this NG but it actually does give me what I need: 16 xlr inputs all
sent to the computer individually over firewire.

The new version has USB2. So now you have to more rants, I'd do the one
about why it hasn't got USB3. The cheap stuff is all kinda good anyway, what
you get with the costly stuff is kinda repairable and beyond belief good so
that it is worth repairing.

Sell the one you have and get the new version since it seems to be just what
works for you.

TWJ

Kind regards

Peter Larsen