expand motu 828mkII with adat lx-20/XT20 (and more) urgent..

[ddanyboy]

hi, thanks for reading this!

I have some questions about how to get the most quality when mixing.
We have recorded some song on a amek angela -> studer 827. Then transfered to an alesis HD24. and copied that to the computer. Now we are thinking about mixing in our own studio (computer and plugins will be used) and I have some questions about that.

first;
it would be nice to have the mix on our mixer, but will i loose soundquality? its a Soundtracs Topaz 8-bus... (is it better to mix internal in the computer??)

second, since i only have 10 ouputs from the soundcard (motu 828mkII) i have to expand. im thinking about using an alesis lx20 or XT20 adat and use its converters. what do you think about that? Are they equal the ones in my soundcard? If not, is it really noticeable?

third; is there big quality differences between lx20, XT20 and an AI3?

please help me out as soon as possible..
Thanks

[everybody's x]

Originally Posted by ddanyboy

first;
it would be nice to have the mix on our mixer, but will i loose soundquality? its a Soundtracs Topaz 8-bus... (is it better to mix internal in the computer??)

Hmm, thats a big ball of wax there, search for threads with" ITB OTB" in the title and you'll pull up 10,000 opinions on the subject.

the topaz is a good board if you want to go out of the box and you know what you are doing then try it and see if you like it better (I do)

there's a lot of ways you can go, I think with ten outputs on the motu maybe send stems out to the soundtracs and analog sum them,

or something like this

track 1 kick
track 2 snare
track-3-4 OH and room mics
track 5-6 bass
track 7-8 gtr
track 9-10 vox

or some variant of that

buss to

buss one stereo drums
bus two stereo gtrs and bass
buss 3 vox


you get the idea,

A/B that with an internal bounce and see what you like better

[ddanyboy]

thanks for the answer! thing is that there will be no time to compare. ive done as you discribe before, but i it would feel better with some more channels, if you understand my bad english. but i guess you mean that the adats doesnt sound as good as the motu and it would be a loss to use them?

[everybody's x]

No, I have no experience with the adat converters, so I didn't comment on them, I wouldn't want to give you bad advice.

I do know that lots of great albums were made with them though

[pdadda]

Bump because I am in a similar boat. I have a MOTU828mkii and I want to send 16 channels out to my board to mix. I can get a Behringer ADA8000 for the same price as a very lightly used ADAT LX20. Any reccomendations?

[monsterz]

No problems here using the Behringer ADA8000 with my MOTU 828mk2. I am pretty sure that the Behringer uses the same DA converters as an ADAT. Sounds fine to me.