Mike!
I can't than you enough for taking the time to write such a helpful, detailed response. Much more than I expected or deserve. Some responses and such inserted below...
On Monday, March 22, 2021 at 5:43:17 PM UTC-4, Mike Rivers wrote:
One thing you haven't said anything about is how you're mixing. Is that
"in the box" with Samplitude? I ask, because you do have a Mackie mixer
in your collection.
The Mackie was purchased back when I was playing a lot of more commercial gigs as a keyboard player and used to mix my keyboard rig in performances. These days, I'm a position where I don't have to take those gigs anymore, and now I stick to what I love... straight ahead jazz and classical ... and play acoustic pianos or a single sampled piano keyboard when the venue can't provide a real piano. I haven't used the Mackie for anything other than the six extra mic pres in years. All mixing is done on the DAW with Samplitude.
You have some pretty good gear right now. If there's a weak link, it's
probably the M-Audio Delta 1010. It's going on 20 years old and they're
making much better converters today, at practically giveaway prices.
Curious about this. When I feed the 1010's spdif in w/ the Apogee, and have the Apogee do the clocking, does the 1010 still have an effect on the signal or does it just pass the digital data from the Apogee untouched? The eight analog inputs are, as you say, definitely weak links.
The Mackie VLZ preamps are actually pretty good - Not a Great River, and
a notch down from a Scarlett or Clarett (there's really very little
difference between those two) but certainly still usable. I'm not trying
to talk you out of buying a box of 8 preamps with or without an A/D
converter, just telling you that what you have now isn't so bad.
My distaste for the Mackie pres is admittedly unreasonable for their cost.... for what they are (inexpensive preamps included on an inexpensive board), they are pretty incredible. They just don't have a lot of headroom and behave badly when pushed too hard so great care needs to be taken in setting input levels. Yes, gain-staging is always important (great article on your website, BTW... really enjoy your writing), but at least in my experience the Mackie pres are particularly unforgiving. Also, their sound varies quite a bit depending upon the mic used. Some mics do very well with them (KM184, TLM103) and don't show as much night/day improvement with the Great River, while others, for whatever reasons, (QTC-1, AT4041 and AT4050.... especially the 4050) sound like different, MUCH better mics on the Great River. The 4050 is awful.. chunky, covered, dull.... on the Mackie pres. Well... again... "awful" is way too strong. It sounds great for a relatively inexpensive microphone on a dirt cheap preamp.
...but I've heard from
a very reliable source that more than a smattering of people have been
having trouble with Scarletts, but he didn't tell me the nature of the
problems.
Is this a source you converse with regularly? If so and it presents no inconvenience nor ethical dilemmas, I'd be very curious to know what the problems were. Review/forum sites are replete with discussions along the lines of "The Focusrite drivers SUCK!! Couldn't ever get the thing to work right.... took it back and bought a ... instead, and it ROCKS! Focusrite is garbage!" followed by, "DUDE, you just don't know what you're doing. My Focusrite is ROCK solid, never had an issue with it, and it sounds as good or better than my $40,000 MoonRock D/A!!!!".. ad infinitum. I have no idea what to believe. Given my experience with other equipment, and in other areas of my life in which I have more expertise, I'm inclined to chalk up the bad reviews to user error, but one never knows.
In the Mackie VLZ to Great River huge spectrum of pre quality, where do the Clarett pres lay? Are the driver
instability issues related more to user error/ignorance (typical) or are they a real issue?
As far as preamps go, it would be a matter of preference. Do you have
the Great River NV series or the earlier generation? The NV is designed
to have Neve-like coloration while the Clarett is designed more for
purity. I have an early Great River MP-2H that I got while I was working
with Mackie in the VLZ days. One evening after work we did a shootout
between the Great River and a 1402VLZ with mixed results. Neither was
better, just different.
I've got one of the early ones, too... MP-2H with the unbalanced and balanced outs, bought from Fletcher @ Mercenary way back when (like most of the other stuff I've mentioned...)
Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 - Same questions/issues as above, only cheaper and of lesser quality, but readily available now.
Are the Claretts hard to get? They've been out for two years now. Maybe
it's a China manufacturing thing (though that's only an assumption of
both).
Right now, most of the usual sources show a lot of the Focusrite stuff out of stock, especially the Clarett line... including the Focusrite site itself. I don't know why.
In general, Don Pierce is correct - there may be measurable
differences between different units but there are are enough other
things that can get in the way of a pristine recording that you should
consider functionality and cost first (as you're doing) and then think
hard about the small differences.
Great advice. As with almost everything, a great craftsman can create great things even with mediocre tools, while a poor craftsman can have the best tools at his/her disposal and create nothing but garbage. I am still very much in the learning stages of this craft (and always will be, as I've always been in the "learning stage" of whatever I'm deeply interested in, including my profession as a musician), and realize that mic selection and placement has a lot more to do with results than A/D conversion topography, especially given today's converters.
I think that they're different in enough ways so that it would be hard
to say which was better for your purposes. Focusrite has always made
good sounding preamps so there's no reason for them to make a
not-so-good one with the Scarlett. RME always gets a nod for good
preamps on their interfaces, but they're most famous for the cleanliness
on the digital side and their well written (and their generally
trouble-free) drivers.
The primary goal was to get more channels of high quality mic pres, with better (and USB) A/D converters as an added plus. Now you have me rethinking that, re/ your comment about the converters in the 1010 being the weak link. While the Apogee sounds noticeably better than the 1010, a cheapie Tascam US-366 interface (used for quick grabs from vinyl and recording rehearsals on location, mostly) doesn't strike me as appreciably better or worse than the 1010 sound-quality wise. If the RME converters would be a significant step up, even from the Apogee, then maybe it makes more sense to go that way and start collecting a variety of mic pres. Downside.. portability. I do a lot of location stuff, and a 2 or 3 space rack bag and laptop would be preferable.
Interface format - Currently have USB 2.0 only. For the stuff I do, any concrete advantage to a new laptop with 3.0 and/or Thunderbolt capability?
Nope. You can run 64 channels at 24-bit 48 kHz over USB 2.0.
WONDERFUL. Good to know.
ADAT optical - never used it. Apogee PSX100 has ADAT I/O, and can use them to spread higher resolution sample frequencies over multiple channels on an external recorder. Any way to put it's ADAT I/O to good use with any of the above products?
Generally, ADAT optical just works, but you need to understand how to
set up a master/slave for clocking, since each one has its own digital
clock. The ADAT sMux convention uses two cables to pass the advertised
number of channels at 2x sample rate, and some offer just one connector
so an 8-channel preamp will get you four channels at 2x sample rate.
There's also a definition for 4x sample rate but hardly anyone uses that.
Got it. I guess I should have asked a slightly more pointed question. The OctoPre has an 8 channel ADAT optical out. Attaching that to the PSX-100's adat optical in does.... what? The Apogee can only output two channels via spdif, AES/EBU, or analog, or spread higher sample rates for two channels across four or eight via it's ADAT output. Given my current equipment, an OctoPre could be used as eight mic preamps, with it's eight analog outputs feeding the eight analog inputs of my 1010... basically replacing the Mackie... but the OctoPre's ADAT output would not be usable. Is that correct? And... if it is... it would make more sense, given your observation about the weak conversion in the 1010, to start with a better (and more convenient portable, meaning USB) interface and then consider the preamp situation... which kind of leads back to the 18i20 or Clarett 8Pre USB.... or a good standalone USB interface that will accept ADAT inputs?
Got enough good mics?
Never. Locker is a pair each of KM184s, QTC-1s, AT4041s, and AT4050s, a single TLM103, and a handful of SM57s. I had purchased a Wright omni (I think that's the correct spelling, but not sure) from Fletcher way back when (handmade mic, I believe) as it had been highly recommended for recording upright bass, but it didn't work well for me back then (could have been me, and not the mic), so I sent it back and bought the TLM103 instead. Very different mic, obviously, but I found it more useful. There's SO many other mics I'd like to add, but with the mics I have now I can usually find one that sounds pretty good on whatever I need to capture. The issue is that I don't have enough channels to use them all... when I get to that point, I'll need to expand the mic collection without a doubt. There's already times when I've thought... "A 184 would sound great here... let me grab one... oh, crap, they're both in use already ..."...
...
For a good time, call http://mikeriversaudio.wordpress.com
I didn't call, but have already spent some quality time reading there.... thanks again!
Best to you, Mike.
Barry