higher end i/o options for powerbook

ive been tyring to figure out the best way to run converters into my powerbook. im going for high(er) quality gear which im not gonna need or want to upgrade in a few years.

the rme digiface seems like my best option, although they dont have osx drivers for it yet. with this ill have a good deal of flexibility as to what kind of converters to run into it. im assuming they will release drivers sometime, but im certainly not gonna buy it if they havent yet.

apogee has the 8 channel rosetta with the forthcoming firewire option, but thats a little bit expensive for me. looking at cost vs. quality, the extra quality isnt something i am ready to pay for. i think that my money could be put towards something else that would suit me better.

im mostly looking for any suggestions. what would you do? if there is some option i havent thought of or that i dont know about yet, id like to know.

i dont need a lot of channels (8 of input is more than i need, and only 3 or 4 of outputs), although i also dont want to be stuck if in a few years i want more i/o. most of my current and planned work is solo artist recording with overdubs and the occasional tracking live with extra accompaniment.

[jbchef]

How about Metric Halo I/O

People seems to like the converters, when compared to MOTU's stuff.....
The internal mic pre is nice for some stuff, it's too noisy for me....

Moko

[entropy]

What about the apogee mini me?

Personally I'm going to go the 828mk2 as a firewire option and then add a decent a-d at a later date but would be interested what others have to say.

i have an 828 right now and i want to get rid of it. the power supply in it is horribly loud. the noise gets into my signals by emf i think, it goes into my mic pres.

[Brad Lunde]

The Metric Halo ULN2 (or 2882) are the firewire solutions that I get good reports on. I worked hard to "get them in our stable" because I think they have a design focus (going for sound quality) that few in the firewire business have. Public awareness is low, but a surprising number of high end users really love the way these boxes sound.

Brad

the uln2 look ok except for it only has 1 digital input. at least thats what i gathered from the webpage... that you have to choose between spdif and aes. if it had at least one more digital input it would be fine for me.

i plan on getting a mini me, and later one or two more boxes of the lucid 2 channels. its just silly how hard it is to get those signals into a laptop though. if i had a tower computer i could buy a pci card for cheap and i would have no problems with this stuff.

[robdarling]

The digiface works fine under osx. I'm using it as we speak. If you don't want to go with it, then a magma expansion chassis with an rme card is the best way to go if you want high quality audio- just put whatever convertor you want on the end of it. If you went with the magma chassis, you could also consider the putting the Lynx cards into it, which also sound fantastic.

[edmann]

If you are seriously considering a Metric Halo device I suggest you go to the user's forum - link at http://www.mhlabs.com and read for yourself. Reserach "digital i/o"..."ADAT grunge" etc

You will get good AD/DA quality. You may not be able to get any digi i/o functionality at all. Some do - others don't. Only one person that I know of was able to maintain digital sync for more than 10-15 minutes. Some can't get it at all. Higher SRs and 24 bit also would appear to be more problematic than 16 bit 44.1 Apparently it has to do with the rest of the gear in the setup, but obviously MH devices do not have very strong stabile and predictable digital i/o functionality. Metric Halo will not tell you this - it is up to each user to figure out for themselves after purchase.

I figured out what was going on by reading thru the archive and asking questions. There turned out to me a mini-flood of "me too" posts that came back, with a reasonable amount of irritation at the situation.

Further - because MH is completely dependent upon the energy and well being of one person w/re to software/firmware etc - that is BJ - and they have so many fences to scale just to keep up with OSX and their newly released DSP functionality - it would appear as though this digital i/o problem - which has been present since the EM review in 2002 - is low on the priority list.

If you only want to get great recordings thru the AD - i.e. a chamber group or small ensemble - it is great. If you want to use it as the hub of a digital studio......all I can say is dig thru the archive and decide for yourself.

edmann, ill definitely take your advice into account.

i just checked out the magma expansion chassis, and holy shit. that is exactly the type of product i have been looking for. does anyone have any experience with those? ill see what i can find out about them.

which pci cards have the best digital i/o options? im looking at the lucid 2 channel boxes which have aes, optical spdif, and rca spdif, and the mini me which has aes and rca spdif. maybe rosetta as well, but they pretty much have it covered in terms of flexibility.

[robdarling]

The Lynx cards sound better than any of the options you are discussing and for the same price you will get 4ch i/o up to 192k with expandability up to 16 ch i/o.

[Beezoboy]

rob,

Lynx doesn't make a pcmcia card or firewire solution yet. He needs it for a laptop.

Beez

but beezoboy, i discovered that there are cardbus to pci adaptors, so now my options are much broader.

rob, im gonna be working in 24 44.1 for a while since i have a g4 867. probably 96k in the future sometime, but 192 is not something im looking at at all.

as far as the lynx goes, it doesnt have any digital i/o. and thats all i want, digital.

it looks like rme has the best selection of digital interfaces so im gonna investigate that a little more

[edmann]

Originally posted by chikkenguy
rob, im gonna be working in 24 44.1 for a while since i have a g4 867. probably 96k in the future sometime, but 192 is not something im looking at at all.

it looks like rme has the best selection of digital interfaces so im gonna investigate that a little more

good point: I don't think anyone is seriously looking at 192 yet as there is not really enough CPU power in existance to drive moderate/serious track counts w/plugins.

see: manufacturer hype

if you are working from a laptop that has cardbus then the RME digiface will absolutely give you the most channels of digital in - altho no AES and only 1 S/PDIF - so obviously as much optical as you can muster is the way to go. Also the built in headphone/monitor output (stereo D/A) is very useful

edmann, the digiface is a very appealing unit to me. rme is coming out soon with a 4x AES to adat-toslink which would be able to run nicely into the digiface. i think alesis makes a similar converter box.

my only concern is with the amount of digital deviced all hooked up, what are my chances of sync problems?

i plan on getting a mini me, and probably 2 lucid ad9624s, and one da9624. so thats 4 converter boxes, one digiface, and one digital format converter. 6 boxes. well i could get a wc. except the mini me has no wc inputs.

if i just sync all the devices off the mini-me, how good are my chances of a totally stable system?

or would i be able to clock all the other devices and then sync the mini-me off of them?

i dont know much about synching issues at all.

[robdarling]

The Lynx actually does have an aes/spdif i/o pair on it.

But what I'm saying about Lynx is that you don't need digital i/o- its convertors are higher quality than any of the boxes you are talking about. A single slot chassis would give you four channel i/o that sounds better than the Lucid or Mini-Me.

If you still want some digital i/o it does have the aes/spdf pair on each card and in addition you can add a digital expansion board (either aes or lightpipe) to the Lynx card if you want to add different conversion.

They also make a 16 channel aes card.

Not to axe grind- I just hate to see people spend money without all of the options presented to them when they can have something better.

robdarling, which lynx model are you talking about?

ive also been entertaining the notion of getting the digiface and the panasonic ad96 converters. nice and cheap but still good quality. then i could put my money towards mic pres that will still actually be nice in 10 years...

[edmann]

Originally posted by chikkenguy
edmann, the digiface is a very appealing unit to me. rme is coming out soon with a 4x AES to adat-toslink which would be able to run nicely into the digiface. i think alesis makes a similar converter box.

my only concern is with the amount of digital deviced all hooked up, what are my chances of sync problems?

i plan on getting a mini me, and probably 2 lucid ad9624s, and one da9624. so thats 4 converter boxes, one digiface, and one digital format converter. 6 boxes. well i could get a wc. except the mini me has no wc inputs.

if i just sync all the devices off the mini-me, how good are my chances of a totally stable system?

or would i be able to clock all the other devices and then sync the mini-me off of them?

i dont know much about synching issues at all.

I think if you can evenly distribute the WC from either the mini-me or the Lucids, you will have a well-clocked system. Of course this is only necc. if you intend to be using them all at once, and if you are - you would have to have the mini-me be the master clock. A WC distribution box - which I think Lucid makes (GenX?) may be useful.

[edmann]

Originally posted by robdarling
The Lynx actually does have an aes/spdif i/o pair on it.

But what I'm saying about Lynx is that you don't need digital i/o- its convertors are higher quality than any of the boxes you are talking about. A single slot chassis would give you four channel i/o that sounds better than the Lucid or Mini-Me.

If you still want some digital i/o it does have the aes/spdf pair on each card and in addition you can add a digital expansion board (either aes or lightpipe) to the Lynx card if you want to add different conversion.

They also make a 16 channel aes card.

Not to axe grind- I just hate to see people spend money without all of the options presented to them when they can have something better.

This is cool and worth noting Rob. Do you own a Lynx card? The converters are that good? That is great. A Modular system.

[robdarling]

There are three Lynx cards: The L2, L22, and AES 16. The AES 16 is 16ch aes i/o, the L22 is 2in, 2out with additional st. aes i/o and a digital expansion slot to which an aes or lightpipe board can be attached for a total of 16ch i/o.

The card I'm suggesting is the L2, which comes in three flavors: 4in/4out, 2in/6out, and 6in/2out. Each also have aes/spdf i/o and an expansion slot to attach additional digital i/o. You can chain up to four cards.

If you really want legs on your system, get a 4 slot chassis and you could grow into 16 analog i/o and then greater i/o with digital cards and outboard conversion. The other great thing about the four slot chassis is that you can get a pci host card for it that will also let you attach to a tower so your cards can easily switch over to a more powerful system when you are at home.

Best,

Rob

[robdarling]

Edmann- yes I own the Lynx cards. I've had a Radar, 888's, 192i/o, AD-8000 SE, PSX-100 SE, and Mytek 896 convertors and the Lynx is what I use every day. They are very good.

[edmann]

Originally posted by robdarling
Edmann- yes I own the Lynx cards. I've had a Radar, 888's, 192i/o, AD-8000 SE, PSX-100 SE, and Mytek 896 convertors and the Lynx is what I use every day. They are very good.

Well I thank you Rob - this is great input at just the right time. Are you saying that (to your ears) the performance of the Lynx converters exceeds that of the Mytek?

[Jules]

Rob knows his sh!t...

[robdarling]

Yes, I prefer the sound of the Lynxes to the Myteks.

Thanks, Jules.

[edmann]

Originally posted by robdarling
Yes, I prefer the sound of the Lynxes to the Myteks.

Thanks, Jules.

Thanks to you both - Rob and Jules.