[Les Cargill[_5_]]

Mike Rivers wrote:
On 12/12/2020 7:52 PM, Les Cargill wrote:
:

You only get a Focusrite interface if you promise
not to try to fix them. I had broken buttons on mine; I took
the plastic out and use a crochet needle to hit the switches.

Â* Mike Rivers wrote
geez, how far did you have to drop it?

I transported it without a rack, and a mic stand rolled into them.

Sounds like plain bad luck. That'll probably never happen again.

Nope.

I would
have asked Focusrite for some new buttons.

i never use those buttons anyway.

I don't know how people lose
knobs on their Mackie mixers (they're pretty hard to pull off) but I've
easily gotten replacements. Of course that was the "old Mackie" when
Greg was in charge. Today it might be different.

Â* Well... it's $500 and it lasts as long as lt lasts or what, %5,000Â* and
it lasts "forever" - long as you repair it.

. . . . or until it becomes obsolete andÂ* you can't do today's work with
yesteryear's hardware. There are a few holdouts like me, but there's a
lot of 5 year old used gear on eBay or Reverb that still works and most
even has all the knobs - and surprisingly for not as cheap as something
declared no longer useful ought to be.


I got 12 years out of the last device that failed.

Just the space for a real console is kind of daunting.

That's the part of the commitment to having a studio that we just don't
get nowadays. You don't need any rack space for a compressor for every
track, you don't even have very much money. And, dammit, it works as
well as the real thing once you get the hang of it. It does my heart
good when I see a $400 plug-in. But the $40 version of the same function
doesn't need to be expendable because software doesn't break, at least
not in the same way as hardware.

With my experience, I can troubleshoot and repair a console, but I can't
troubleshoot something in a computer-based system that doesn't work
right. When I was an active studio, most studios had the skill available
to keep their gear going.


Valid point - but it all Just Works these days. Once you basically
figure out how to test an interface, the rest is just cabling.


Now those studios that are still in business and have moved to software
have an IT expert on staff or on call. And the solo musician with a
studio gets on a forum and asks for help, which usually involves getting
the latest version of something.

. . .Â* the new digital consoles, for me, are all obsolete because
they don't have enough inputs to have "tape" returns

True that. It's a lot done "in the box" now.

Funny about that. You buy a mixing console, then you use your computer
as the recorder, and instead of sending tracks back to the mixer, you
mix them on the computer. The console becomes a tracking tool, and then
becomes obsolete until the next session.


At least you don't have to "turn the board".

--
Les Cargill