Just FYI and FWIW :

My newest DAW is :
WinXP Pro SP2
ASUS NCCH-DL motherboard with two 2.8 GHz 800 Mhz FSB Xeon procs
1 gig ECC RAM
UAD-1 and AES16 cards on the 32 bit PCI buss
Adaptec 29160 SCSI card on the 64 bit PCI buss
lots of SCSI drives.
Cubase SX3

My fastest setup is two IBM 10k RPM drives in a software RAID 0. On these
drives I was able to record and playback 56 tracks with out drop outs etc.

Keep in mind I only had 8 channels of converters at the time so the PCI buss
activity was a lot less when recording then it would of been if I had 56
channels of inputs ( 7 times the data streaming into the PC ) I would think
that more actual inputs would reduce the amount of tracks I can do at least
a little but on this motherboard i have my digital audio I/O card and hard
drive interface card on separate busses so it might not make a huge
difference.

--
John L Rice


"William Krick" wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a friend who has a home studio. He's enlisted my help in
building a new PC to use for recording.

He needs to record 12 or more _analog_ channels simultaneously on a PC
at 192KHz/24-bit.

I've been researching the current PC based recording hardware
technology and I'm not sure that this is even possible.

12+ analog channels at 192/24 produces a huge volume of data. This
data has to come into the PC over the PCI bus, and at the same time, be
moved stored on the hard drive. It seems to me that the PCI bus and/or
the IDE bus would present an insurmountable bottleneck.

Is anyone out there doing this? If so, what exact hardware are you
using, both PC hardware and recording hardware. I'd really like to
know.

I'm confused about external A/D converter units (like the FireFace) vs.
internal units like the Hammerfall series.
Which are people using, and why?

Are people using Windows XP?

What actual recording/editing software is up to this task?