48 channel cheapo setup suggestions?

[znerol_1]

Hi everybody,

after a long wait we finally received our six units of the aphex 188 and I was able to put them to use at the beginning of the month during a seaside festival with hurricane and all.. no big problems though.. thoughts go out to the victims of the Indiana state fair disaster.. (does anyone else feel that their stage construction looked very whimsical?)

Well, the 188 units worked very well and it was great to be able to control gain from our OB location instead of having to sit near the rack.

While the hardware seems to work fine I am not so convinced by the remote control software.. on windows it looks like a total kids toy and is rather confusing, the mac version is better but is lacking some essential feature like a meter bridge for all the units in the system. As it stands only meters for one unit can be seen at a time..

Also the software seems based on really outdated programming since on a mac rosetta is required to run it..

The software seemed stable but a more up-to-date feel and features like said meter bridge would be welcome..

Does anyone know of a way to integrate the 188 preamps with protools or nuendo? Any advice would be much appreciated

Hopefully I will receive some pictures of the 188 in action soon so I can post them here.

Cheers,
Loz

[Beyersound]

Originally Posted by Murton

As a FOH mixer, I'm telling you now, I will not give up direct gain control of my lines to facilitate a broadcast or recording split.

Going active is probably cheaper and easier than going passive with XFM'ers.

Usually we will be running a two way split, direct to FOH and transformer isolated to monitors. If you want to introduce broadcast and recording splits, they need to bring their own splitter and looms or have in the production budget money to hire a 4 way splitter, either passive with good transformers or 4 way active for the amount of channels involved.

It's going to solve a lot of problems down the line. You will get FOH and monitor engineers telling you to take a hike, you expect them to change their entire console scene gain structure because you don't have a proper splitter and expect them to use your gain and your preamps.

I would go for the following:

6x Octopre mkII Dynamic/Aphex 188
Your line I/O module
RME ADAT to MADI
MADI interface in your PC
MADI splitter
48/56 channels of active splitters, 2 way to take the monitor or FOH feed and enough looms to piggyback on their spliter, giving them the direct out, you taking the transformer isolated split.

With live recording your biggest challenge is interfacing with production and not effecting thier operation. I only do small live recording setups (16-18 channels) when I'm walking into an external production. I carry a whirlwind passive transformer equiped two way splitter and enough looms to feed my snake and the inhouse snake with lines being plugged into my splitter box, then loomed to their stage box. I would only do larger setups if I was doing FOH or monitors (Which is usually the case) and I could just record my lines or I had a larger splitter or production had a 3/4 way splitter and provided me a feed.

I'll reiterate, aim to have as little of an effect on the live production as possible, provide a splitter or take a split feed, run your audience mics/any other specific mics to your broadcast/recording, make sure you have plenty of power cable to run to your van/room and long enough MADI core to your van etc, run a UPS for the computer, run a backup recorder, also cable trays/carpet is a good investment.

+1, this man knows what he is talking about. I am a FOH mixer as well, done lots of broadcasts of my shows, really hated the way some of the "budget" remote rigs encroached on my live mix, and I never gave up direct gain control to anyone. My favorite 2 rigs included full 48 & 56ch passive transformer splits I could give to the remote record.

[znerol_1]

Originally Posted by Beyersound

...really hated the way some of the "budget" remote rigs encroached on my live mix, and I never gave up direct gain control to anyone.

Well, I agree as far as a pro setup exist in the first place... with the 188 we now can actually provide an active split to FOH and monitor.. they still moan because they can't control phantom power from their boards.. instead they prefer to use a passive three way splitter of more than questionable quality with very long analog multicore run to FOH.. the sound is very notably affected by this as I can tell by direct comparison... so for the sake of not letting "encroach" the sound would be a lot shitter than it could be..

..and then someone let a lot of rainwater from the stage roof drain directly into their splitters.. need I say more? Going directly into our preamps and giving the fixed / zero
-gain active split to them and their (shitty) splitters results in a marked inmprovement.. and that is what I am trying to promote.. improvement.

Anyways, I will test this setup a bit more during the next few festivals and if it all works out I might well get a few more of these 188s they I like their small size, active split capability, and remote control.. since I am expected to provide a multi-stage live broadcast on the cheap next year this seems to be a fairly good value setup.. and convincing the PA guys to trust our preamps / split is kind of breaking a tabu, I know.. but big boss knows how much extra rental of active splitters cost every time so.. that's how I 'won' in the end, I guess..

so long,
Loz