[Les Cargill[_4_]]

wrote:
Hi there audio pros.

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


They are designed for home recordists.

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


8 is a perfectly fine home recording number - it's what
the TASCAM units mostly topped out at. 2,4,8.

8 is a nice round number ( one bit set in binary; doesn't get much
rounder than that ) that will fit in a 1 RU rackmount device.

SO what you need is an 8 XLR thingy with Lightpiipe, and another 1 RU
Lightpipe interface ( like a Behringer ADA8000 ) to get you to 16.


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, as the only control
over individual monitor levels also changes the level sent to the
recorded track. So you get everyone mic'd up, set the levels nicely
and then the bass player says 'just a little more of me in the cans
please' but you can't give him what he wants without the recorded
bass track suddenly getting louder.


Well, yeah - you need a real cue mixer. I use a 16 channel unit -
Focusrite w/ Lightpipe and use REAPER for a cue 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. And because it is a
full blown mixing desk I can adjust the input gain to get the
required recording level and then set the players' individual
monitors on the faders.


Sounds good, then.
-
But this thing is firewire only, and it's getting pretty impossible
now to find a laptop with firewire (or even expresscard so you can
add one). I need to find some hardware that does what the helixboard
24 does but over USB. Now you can get a USB version of the helixboard
and this may be what I end up buying, but I would really like to
consider some alternatives. But all my googling and searching just
turns up the kind of interfaces I previously described: 8 xlrs, crap
monitoring, and for 'USB mixers' it is nearly always the case that
only the stereo mixdown is sent over the USB, not the individual
tracks.


For 16, the Focusrite 18i20 plus a 8 channel Lightpipe box will work
great.

If you really need 24, maybe an Allen & Heath ZED-R16 would work for
you . Pound for pound, it's a great device.

So I'd appreciate any insights anyone may have on what is out there,
and who uses these 8 input devices and is there some trick that I'm
missing with respect to the monitoring? Because I find it hard to
believe that there are so many devices out there following the same
(imo) flawed formula.

many thanks, TWJ.



--
Les Cargill