Break "down time" DAW vs Hardware setups - vote on the poll!!!

[Jules]

How often are you getting out the tool kit or calling an expert in to fix stuff?

[littledog]

Given what i was coming from - 3 Blackface ADAT's and an Alesis X2 board, ANYTHING would have resulted in less down-time.

The worst I ever seem to have to deal with now is about a 20 minute wait on a tech support phone call to Digi, Apple, etc. or in less pressing circumstances, a next day response to an e-mail cry for help.

[jeronimo]

I have my studio for about a year and a half and my analog Tascam mixer was the only thing that caused down time

[Anonymatt]

Thing is, seems like hardware never truly breaks all the way down.

I mean, a hard drive could get fried or a processor could fry, and you're screwed. "My console broke," isn't really something you hear that often. Something might be messed up, but it's always the kind of thing you can patch around, you know?

The time you spend troubleshooting which part of your analog signal chain ("I guess that buss/cable/channel is just bad, then, huh?") seems about equivalent to the time you spend waiting for your computer to simply work ("Why haven't we been able to log into the server for fifteen minutes? Oh, there it goes.").

[stuntmixer]

That's always been my complaint about anything digital: when it breaks a little, it's broke. In the analogue world you can always figure something out ; run on one tube, bypass the broken section, use another channel instead. With digital. if anything goes down: no noise comes out.

I'm a guitar player though, whatja 'spect.

[Geert van den Berg]

You can also have Digital Hardware, right? My experience is that going from a digital recorder/editor to a computer DAW system has indeed caused more downtime and trouble. And it indeed seems to me hardware is more reliable, but you need more boxes to do the same thing as with a computer DAW. But in the end it's usually not the same since the hardware usually sounds better because it's dedicated. Why can't they make computer DAW's dedicated? Enormously complicated appz. with tons of features are written instead of streamlining stability. I don't need beat detective, it almost never works with your material only in pre-made demo's, shown by car-salesmen. Okay, and sometimes it does work.

To be fair, a combination of nowadays digital and analogue is the best of both worlds, a pity that allmost all the analog gear is gone were I work.

[pounce]

the daw has been pretty well behaved for a while now, but my other gear has needed more attention than usual. mostly cold solder joints and the like that just needed to get touched up and some lithium batteries that needed to be switched out. nothing serious. so a little higher repair budget in the past 6 months than usual, but it hasn't been computer down time. just regular broken stuff down time. the mixer being gone over for a three day stretch was the worst i had to deal with. (i picked a week i was running live sound at an event so it didn't affect the workflow, hooray for planning)

like many, my editing and tweaking is going a bit faster now thanks to the daw and how fast i've been getting around it recently. the mac has been running very well. DP and PT don't seem to crash on me, so i dont' have to get under the hood unless i'm installing updates to the software or new software.

hoping one of the new rumored macs and a nice 64 bit os will remove most of the issues i'd been having with a computer based daw. getting my few last critical plug ins ported to osx will let me make the switch and i suspect that will be the computer based daw solution i had always imagined.

[Alécio Costa]

I decided not to get rid of some of my ADAT XTs and a Roland DM800, my debut DAW. They are my standby system. When MAC fails, I have the option of not stopping the whole studio.

My biggest pains in the ass were involving SCSI drives with my Dm800. Also, the eternal chase for a nice ADAT tape. I dunno why, maybe it is related with Brazilian hot weather, all brands of tape suck here, except for the AMPEX original formula. I have seen lots of guys using TDK SVHS with better results!lol

I have a G3 beige fried last year. So i had to go after a G4 800, expensive for our economic reality. I had 2 crzy bugs but nothing to be dying of.

In fact I am a MAC moron.
Being able to do lots of templates, yes, that saves you lots of time, as digital board ( 02r in my case) scenes.

I agree with the older guy that analog hardware boxes shall go to war with one arm and one leg.

lol

Nice week to ya folks

fuuck

[BrianT]

I like to live on the bleeding edge of DAWS. It's a hobby, like hotrodding and racing cars when I was a teenager. Sometimes things break when you do that, but when they do, computers are sure cheaper than American bigblock V8 engines. And you don't get greasy or killed either.

That said, even with some self induced downtime, there is no doubt that I get more work done in a given week than I ever did on any linear format, 2", Sony 48 or whatever. And even if I've paid a price in downtime, it's been my choice to push the technical envelope, and what I've learned in the process is invaluable to me.

There was about 1 year that I left my Paris system alone, with the room being used for tracking and mixing daily for mostly 16+ hour days. Reliability for that year exceeded any other setup I've ever had, without question. We never cancelled a session for tech reasons, and IIRC, lost a total of about 2 hours downtime that whole year.

But I just couldn't leave it alone. Never really did that well at leaving things alone.


Regards,
Brian T

[jon]

The DAW is just one part of the whole picture. It requires maintenance and TLC just like everything else does.

Both the DAW and the SSL have computers, small bugs and occasional system crashes. Hardware gear needs the occasional bulb change or part swap, the DAW needs the occasional software patch, system cleanup, HD format/backup or software update/upgrade.

[Steve Smith]

interesting double question in your poll, you had one option about your overall productivity, and then others about actual downtime. I voted that my analog gives me less downtime, , but like Brian said, I also get more done.

[Jules]

"had"? Productivity?

Eh?

[Beezoboy]

I have absoltely no problems with my DAW whatsoever. I don't use ProToolz. I use a PC with whatever program I feel like tracking on that day, which as of the last couple years has been Cool Edit Pro, but Samplitude is definately pretty cool too.

I think a DAW can be very stable if you DON'T install the latest update and just stick with what works. Once you hit stable operating, just let your DAW stay like that. If it has bugs, then learn what they are and work around them. If thats not ANALOG thinking I don't know what is.

With that said, I'd like to have a nice analog board as a front-end for my DAW. Headphone mixes would be soo much easier.

Beez