Thanks to Myles Mumford and an ebay buyer who backed out, I now have 16 channels of Creamware converters.
The next step will be the Focusrites.
As you may know, I have the buggy version of Pro Tools M-Powered, which allows 32 tracks of simultaneous recording, and an M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge. But I have no converters yet, so this system is useless for now. I was considering a couple of Behringer ADA8000s for the time being. The mic pres are crap but the converters are OK (though one can get a lot better). However, if I want to record hi-res (88.2 or 96 kHz sample rates), I need 96k converters.
Well, they're not so hard to come by, although they're very expensive. And they're mostly A/D converters only. Wouldn't it be nice to have ADAs? There are a few things around, for a lot of money, like Lucid and Lynx. But these either have no ADAT lightpipe I/O, or not enough. For example, the 16-channel Lynx Aurora has an optional ADAT card, but that has only two ports which would allow 8 channels of S/MUX, not 16. The Sonic Core (was Creamware) is the same.
I just discovered that the new Focusrite Octopre comes in two versions: mic pre only with ADAT out, and mic pre with dynamics and ADAT in and out. The ADAT ports on both are capable of S/MUX operation, providing 8 channels lo-res or 4-channels hi-res.
So to do 16 channels hi-res I would need two of these. I could then use another 16 channels of converters without the hi-res option to do 32 channels lo-res, because of course the Octopres can do lo-res too.
And the best bit? RRP on the ADA version is $900 a piece!
Ask any engineer and you hear a few weird stories, from finding old gear to PA horror stories. I've had my share. One of the oddest was when I was recording a 10-minute jazz piece. The computer was running MacOS 9 and Pro Tools 5.1. It crashed about 30 seconds from the end. I mean, the computer froze even though the Pro Tools system kept passing audio. I rebooted but of course the files just recorded weren't registered with the session. So I imported them. Each was now 60 minutes long!
After the 9 minute mark, there were random bits of audio from the previous six months' sessions. After thinking about this for a little while I figured out that evidently, the end of file marker (EOF) that the OS needs to tell where the file ends hadn't been written and so it was just reading the drive sequentially!
Now I work with Simon Polinski, teaching sound production. We're lucky to have recruited him (as you can see if you visited the link above). I've learned a lot from him (and I barely spend any time with him in class as I'm always running around after the students). He tells some great stories.
But today we experienced some Pro Tools weirdness that neither of us had ever seen.
Simon was running a workshop about mastering, for which he'd brought in his Avalon VT747, and things hadn't been going so well. The most intractable problem was that after processing in Pro Tools, running the signal through the Avalon, and returning to an Aux track containing an L1+ limiter he wanted to record the result. So he'd bussed the output of the L1+ to an audio track. The L1+ peaked at -0.3 dBfs, yet the right channel of the audio track was clipping.
He closed and reopened the session. No change. He rebooted Pro Tools. No change. He restarted the computer. No change. That's when he called on me.
We tried everything. When we pulled the output of the Avalon, the right channel should have fallen silent. But it didn't. It read no more than 6 dB below the left (connected) channel. So it appeared there was cross-talk. We narrowed it down to the Pro Tools bus. We tried using another pair of buses and reassigning the right side of the bus pair to a mono bus not adjacent to the left-channel one. Nothing worked.
Then I thought, what would I expect to happen if I sent the L1+ channel down one or other of the buses? We tried both. Either side of the audio track showed clipping because it was now receiving left + right which were peaking at -0.3 dBfs, the output ceiling of the L1+. That's to be expected.
When I reassigned the limiter track's output back to the stereo bus, the problem fixed itself.
So it was a bug which produced one-way crosstalk in the bus. Very weird.
Well, it seems that my audio stash has attracted a bit of attention. I've had two people enquiring about the Pye limiter. Aside from certain models favoured by the likes of Eddie Kramer and Michael Brauer, it seems that any Pye is a tasty prospect.
Well, what am I going to do with it? Get it restored? That was the plan, but I got an offer that seemed too good to refuse: a swap with a Urei 1176.
Initially I refused. I don't have a studio and have no plans to open one, so what was I going to do with an 1176? I'd be swapping one bit of kit that shouldn't be moved around with another bit of kit that shouldn't be moved around. All my colleagues said I was mad. And maybe I was, but it seemed to make sense. Considering what I paid for the thing, it seemed somewhat excessive.
Well, after lending it to the person who made the offer, I find he wants it even more, so I have relented. I have also tailored the deal to gain a strategic advantage. I might have made more from the deal but that's not so important to me.
Just today, another enquiry has come in from someone else. Thanks for your interest, but the deal is done.
A couple of weekends ago I went picking at Windy Ridge, a winery in South Gippsland.
We picked cabernet and malbec.
Cabernet forms nice little bunches. Malbec is a weed!
