Digico D5 for Classical Music. What do you think?

[Roland]

This is some serious stuff they are talking about installing. As far as I know the Digico is 24bit only. Sound wise they are great, most people I have come across think they are as good as anything out there in the live digital set-up. Your client is aware that this sort of set up is going to cost around £250,000? The "local rack" can be equipped with AES or Adat cards to allow other inputs to be used (I'm guessing that this would be the local rack to the broadcast console). Have a look at the Crookwood paintpot remote pre, that also has an AES output, Plush uses one for exactly the same job at one of his regular gigs. As for the recorder, There is the Pink Pig Madicorder, Digico themselves have a show recording solution, Pyramix is another good option, I'm not sure if Euphonix are still making their R1, it was rather expensive and I don't believe they sold many. If budget and interchangeability is the requirement, the pink pig or show recorder options are going to be the cheapest, if real flexibility is required Pyramix will beat anything out there, of course there will be those for whom Pro-tools pushes the all the right buttons.


Regards


Roland

[klaukholm]

Have they considered the new Ramses series from Merging?
Like Roland already said, Merging can offer very powerful and flexible systems for this particular application.

[roonsbane]

Thanks guys for the info,

Roland said

the Digico is 24bit only

I am sure the A/D is in fact at 24 bit. I am talking about the internal math processing resolution that is being done. Sequoia, that I would choose to use over Pyramix personally is at 32 bit Floating point at this point. I am fairly sure if the digico sounds as good as people say that will require something closer to 32 Float or 48 Bit or 64 bit fixed. The important thing is of course that it just sounds great. I would love hear from users especially those that record a lot of acoustic music. I know Steve uses them occasionally. Having used Graces for many years, in my experience they are the first pre that I would want to plug into as a starting point with any acoustic music, they are also a known entity and will certainly be probably the strongest point in the recording chain That is not really what we need to decide on here as it's been done soooo many other times.
Unfortunately, PT is the editor of choice for everyone else that I work with so files need to be easily compatible and easily loadable with very compatible drive bays and file formats.
I will look into pink pig and the merging recorder. I am wanting very reliable, extremely reliable, did i say a very extremely reliable hardware based dedicated hardware. They are not speaking of any multitrack backup which I think is a big mistake, but there of course will always be several two track backups running.

Cameron

[Roland]

Originally Posted by roonsbane

Thanks guys for the info,

Roland said

I am sure the A/D is in fact at 24 bit. I am talking about the internal math processing resolution that is being done. Sequoia, that I would choose to use over Pyramix personally is at 32 bit Floating point at this point. I am fairly sure if the digico sounds as good as people say that will require something closer to 32 Float or 48 Bit or 64 bit fixed. The important thing is of course that it just sounds great. I would love hear from users especially those that record a lot of acoustic music. I know Steve uses them occasionally. Having used Graces for many years, in my experience they are the first pre that I would want to plug into as a starting point with any acoustic music, they are also a known entity and will certainly be probably the strongest point in the recording chain That is not really what we need to decide on here as it's been done soooo many other times.
Unfortunately, PT is the editor of choice for everyone else that I work with so files need to be easily compatible and easily loadable with very compatible drive bays and file formats.
I will look into pink pig and the merging recorder. I am wanting very reliable, extremely reliable, did i say a very extremely reliable hardware based dedicated hardware. They are not speaking of any multitrack backup which I think is a big mistake, but there of course will always be several two track backups running.

Cameron

No, I believe that the Digico is 24 bit throughout. The Studer is 32 bit float as far as I know, but that would cost more than the entire budget! With the Pyramix you potentially wouldn't need a mixer, just a Madi feed, with all due respect to Sequioa (which I believe is an excellent system) Pyramix is quite a serious step up and is now the choice for many of the worlds major television companies and production facilities, particularly bearing in mind the major new developments due for release soon, it is also possible to "bump" the files straight into pro-tools.

Regards


Roland

[roonsbane]

Roland,

I will definetely do more research into the pyramix system. I know that it is arguably among the two or three finest programs, I am only trying to avoid learning one more program for myself. Would the D5 control Pyramix using a controller layer page? Also, unless it is a tested turnkey system, I would still of course be worried about using it with no backup where as I would feel fairly confident using a Radar or Euphonics. Although the full upgrade budget is far more than the 4 D5's unfortunately, even alesis HD24's as a backup has not been mentioned in the budget. We do have access to those on extremely important concerts though.

I now realize why you were suggesting the Crookwood preamp, and I do know they are great pre's. You were thinking that it also has a MADIable A/D interface? Roland my man, this could have some real potential as a very slick sollution.

Thanks again.

Cameron

[Jim vanBergen]

As someone who has done a good bit of mixing on a D5T, I do think the sound of the desk is quite good. I'll also agree that the Studer is extraordinary in sonic quality. Both of these desks have excellent features and I think you should request specific pricing for the configuration you need and onsite demos from both manufacturers, where you can really compare qualities between the desks, and get the answers you need.

The big issue I see is wanting to utilize outboard pre's with the optic split systems. Really, the rate of the internal processing is not worth worrying about, unless you are trying to get the highest sampling speed for your recorded tracks.

Hope this helps!

JvB

[roonsbane]

Thanks Jim for your thoughts,

The most important factor is sonics. I don't think the Studer is even being considered since 4 consoles must be purchased and we are only one of the four users that have a say in the decision. The D5 is on many tech riders on the many show that come through the building. We are checking out another D5 install very soon and my co-worker is the person who was responsible for bringing it in to that venue and used that D5 often in his former job so he is a great resource.

You definitely nailed down the big issue that we feel we need to deal with. I am not worrying about the internal bit rate, but having used many many digital consoles and DAW's over the years. Almost without exception, I have noticed a general rule that the higher the bit rate, the better it sounds (factoring in floating point arithmetic). Think about how much better the 64 bit EQ on a lexicon Opus sounded 15 years ago. Consider how much better ProTools HD sounds than its predecessor. The less rounding off of the math the processor has to do, the better it's going to sound. I am also curious how audio hardware manufacturers deal with those issues. I can't help but feel that the Sony Oxford and Neve Capricorn would still be selling new consoles if they had included some kind of upgrade path to the math. I noticed in the literature that higher sampling rate is an upgrade to the D5. It comes out of the box only running 44.1 and 48k. Digico doesn't include the quantization spec. in their manual, but Yamaha is running at 32bit at this point. It's ultimately of course really an issue of good math verses bad math.

Cameron

[David Rick]

Originally Posted by roonsbane

Digico doesn't include the quantization spec. in their manual, but Yamaha is running at 32bit at this point. It's ultimately of course really an issue of good math verses bad math.

AFAIK, the Yamaha stuff is 32-bit fixed point, using their own ASIC's. But the Yamaha EQ is probably 48-bit fixed-point. My experience on the original Yamaha 02R tells me that 32 bit fixed-point is just not adequate to implement parametric EQ, and I believe the company moved to 48-bit math for the EQ on subsequent products. Digital consoles don't seem to hold their value well. That 02R is still sitting in a corner because nobody wants to buy a 48kHz digital console. I compared the Yamaha EQ to Samplitude/Sequoia (32-bit float) once, for grins, and the Yamaha got its ass kicked.

Many digital consoles are implemented using networked Shark DSP's. This is a 32-bit floating point processor, but it can also do 40-bit fixed-point processing. If the signal processing engineers are smart, they'll do certain kinds of algorithms in fixed-point, and others in floating point.

David L. Rick

[Brofalk]

Hi!
DIGICO has a console named DS-00 that will work fine with the other consoles and is targeted at Broadcast, recording and post. As far as i know, DIGICO uses 40 bit floating in their consoles. And DS-00 and the D4 can run up to 96 kHz samplerate.
regards
Fredrik B