Turtle Beach Quad came with a copy of Windows Wave on a tahiti sound card, after about a year I got a trial copy of wavelab 1.0 on floppy that came with cubase audio for windows. That's what I've used since. 1995 ish.

The turtle beach quad was used on a 486 25mhz with 40 meg drive and 4mb of ram. Wow. I remember 4meg of ram cost $250. 1994 bucks.

Quad was a beast of a 4 track (JK) made me appreciate my ADAT's at the time.

Windows wave...when I wanted to add destructive compression, I hit enter and the next morning it was completed.

Technology.

Here are a couple of screenshots of audio applications that I took from my old G3 Power Mac running Mac OS 8.6.

The first pic is Bias Peak v3.2. I know how fond everyone is with that application!

Pic number two is Waveburner Pro. I'm sure Jerry recognizes that one right off the bat.

Since we're posting software...

This is what I used to mix in. Quartz Audiomaster. I thought it was so cool (I still do). It's the only DAW I've seen that could address several soundcards at once; stayed perfectly synced to boot.

I still have v.6 of Bias Peak running on one of our Mac Pros!

Occasionally it's Audio file repair feature comes in handy!

When they tried to go multi-track with it, the move led to its demise, sadly.

I think I've still got my v.1.0 floppy around somewhere.

Great to see the old version of WBP, before the audio DAW world went mad!

Best, JT

Finally getting around to adding the pic from the op and original thread mentioned in the first post.

Over the last couple of years, I've seen a number of the old Sonic systems show up on ebay, and they were all scooped-up. Don't know who is buying, but those old systems apparently are still in use.

Probably scooped up for a song!

Yeah if those are 24-bit systems they're still useful, and sound great.

Kinda sweet knowing that they cost a kings ransom when they were new!

I guess the limitations would be; won't do HD 96k audio, no DDP, no metadata support.

But for capturing, editing etc... why not.

Then there's the issue of keeping the old host Mac running, ancient power supply and motherboard.

Probably more efficient just to get a slightly used Mac Pro Intel tower & soundBlade.

Best, JT

If I remember correctly, the old Sonic systems were using Motorla DSP on the plug-in cards and they were all very high precision calculations (80 bit maybe?). Definitely not 24 bits. Apple also had its SANE numerical precision implementation of IEEE floating point in legacy Mac OS. One of many things that the Mac did much better than the PC.

Hans Maucksch over at Pauler Acoustics in Northeim has one of the old Sonic systems, and was still using it up to last few years. Don't know if he still does or has exclusively switched over to SoundBlade. If you poke around a bit, you can find a boobtoob video showing him running ye olde Sonic system.

The big advantage SoundBlade has, is that it is running in a Unix environment on very high-speed hardware, like my quad-core Xeon. The first time I dragged a 900 MB wav file into ART, couldn't believe how fast it opened and did the waveform draw! If you tried doing that on an old PowerMac based Sonic system, probably could go out for coffee and donuts before you saw anything on-screen.

Finaly found a 1993 photo of my "studio" ^^
https://scontent-cdg2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...f4&oe=59733537

Hahaha(!) now thaaat's vintage!

Good tv reception on the rabbit ears?

and speakers mounted on the wall <(:~)>

What DAW?

Best, JT

Hi Jerry. In this old time i was only doing Beatmaking and electronic music, i started mastering in 1999. No DAW, was sequencing with C-Lab Studio 24 and Protracker on amiga.

Oh yes of course, no offense intended.

Cheers, JT

Dont worry i haven't felt any offence at all. ^^
I posted it cause it is fun too

Another one of our Legacy systems, a 1997 Power Mac G3, running at 266MHz, with a whopping(!) 96MB of RAMM :~o
and the long-in-the-tooth Sound Designer II.
Best, JT

Digital transfer rig is coming along ;)

Nice!
What's the demand like for old format tranfers up there?

Who knows? I aint really advertised it yet, but I already get the "aren't you the obscure digital format guy" messages :)

I still have sony pcm501 (unmodified) and a couple of beta decks. Never used and am ignorant of other (more expensive) early digital audio tape systems, except pcm/beta and dat.

It sounded good to me. At the time some complained that pcm/beta sounded "glassy" whatever that is. Mine still work. Last year blew the dust off after sitting unpowered on a shelf more than 15 years and transferred some ancient mixes, tape stored for decades under very negligent conditions.

Tis a puzzle, in that pre-web era some golden ears types would do experimental multi generation analog dubs with the sony pcm/beta or with dat and claim the nth generation sounds identical to the original. But nowadays people are generally too elegant to use anything so crude and lo-fi.

Did pro's ears get better or what?

PCM501 to beta was a great system, more resilient than DAT tape imo, as the tape is bigger.

was a bit of a godsend actually, as many who mixed to 1/2" analog tape would safety copy their masters to to PCM beta, or even VHS tape.

decades later those PCM safety copies may be all that is left, as defunct labels lost analog masters, etc...

best, jt

Always thought C-lab Notator and Creator were ahead of the curve for their time.
Used to lock to multi-track quite a bit, and still have the system_1040 & Mega 2 Atari

Thanks Jerry

Yeah I got mine as (improved) substitute for quarter-inch 2 track mixdown machine. Half-inch 2 track was too expensive for me.

I don't have enough experience to judge, but had suspicion that maybe digital audio on beta tape might be more durable than DAT.

I was aso copying off a bunch of old mixes done analog-mixer-to-DAT, recorded some years after I was mixing to the PCM 501. The DAT tapes and DAT machine had been as carelessly stored as the Beta tapes. Got real lucky with the old DAT machine and the old DAT tapes as well, no major problems with either DAT or Beta. But I was superstitious enough about fragility of DAT even back then that I'd hardly ever play a DAT after having recorded it. Just play the DAT to digital dub into the Mac Quadra 700 via Audiomedia II card, then put the DAT on the shelf to gather dust. Couldn't mix direct to Quadra 700 hard disk because the Q700 was needed to run Studio Vision or Digital Performer for generating the mix. It wasn't strong enough to do both play and also record the mix at the same time, and costed too much to buy two of em. :)

Earlier in the 1980's with PCM/Beta, with minimal equipment and no digital editing, it was somewhat hit-and-miss to sequence a bunch of songs into an album, but was do-able. With two beta decks and digital-copy between decks via PCM-501, I'd locate the video deck start location for each song, usually spread out on several videotapes, write down the locations into a pencil and paper list. Then digital dub the first song, put the record deck in pause, then as fast possible load the playback machine with the next tape and locate to the next song, press play on the playback machine while taking the record machine out of pause "just the right time" so there was a second or two of silent gap between the last song and current song. Keep doing that until it was all done. So far as I recall, the record beta deck would automatically drop out of pause after 5 minutes or less, so cueing up each song had to be "as quick possible".

Because of the error-correction in the digital tape-to-tape dub, I'd typically take the finished "album tape" and digital dub it to a fresh tape. If the action of putting the record deck into pause between songs happened to add any accidental clicks between songs, the error correction in digital dubbing of the "album tape" often removed inter-song glitches.

Was slower than splicing analog tape but nice for avoiding multi-generation noise and distortion build-up as with analog tape. It took enough time that probably a full-time pro couldn't have made any money doing it that way. Had to be real careful pushing buttons because screwing up in certain ways near the end of assembling an album couldn't be fixed except by starting over from scratch and trying to avoid mistakes the next time. :)

The first setup I used was a pair of Fostex R15 timecode DAT machines to edit between. That fed a pair of Marantz CD recorders with an HHB bit box to convert DAT start ID's to CD track starts. Then a Symetrix digital processor was added. I've never heard a worse sounding box. Thank god that setup was dumped for a Sadie and an M5000. Still fed the Marantz recorders until a SCCSI CD writer was added. Then an MEA2 and MLA2 were added. Then I left.

small world!

i also did the multi-machine pcm and dat tape dubs to assemble masters.

never could afford the big Sony 3/4" U-matic setup $50k whatever.

then the daw came along and changed my life.

most of our dat archive tapes also play well, as they've been stored in ideal conditions.

cheers, jt

Back in the days of analog video the dBx 700 and Sony PCM F1, 501 and the 701 were sometimes used as codecs for transporting real-time digital audio in an analog video channel. Some of you may remember that trick.

BTW for those of you using 701s still I recall that Sony installed a reset capacitor backwards. When they fail the unit will not initialize. I think I sold my 701 service manual recently which contained the note.

So today I had to resurrect a CD project I mastered back in the mid 1990s!
No pressed CD was available to rip, and there were too many edits to simply import the raw SD2 audio file.
So I had to burn a new master at 2x (to rip into Sonic) on my old Yamaha CD-100, with the caddy!
A 22 year old CD burner, and it worked!rockout
I'll extract Wav files and add ISRC for new internet distribution.
Kickin' it old school todayhooppie
With a legacy Mac G3 & MLCD.
best JT
p.s. note the tape head cleaning swabs on the upper left :~O

Atari had the best midi timing and the best feel of anything. Even MPC doesn't time as well as an Atari. Closest program now is Studio One. I'm a logic user though. :-)

Sadie Disk Editor Breakout with Connection Cables and tower | eBay grabbed this for 20 bucks.. why not? I will report back!

anyone need a working JAZ Drive 2gb version ??? might be something someone has on a JAZ disk they need to transfer !!! i bought it a few years ago - bought 3 off ebay before one worked .. let me know !!! trade me for something silly !!!

Sadie 3 restoration project

I decided to post my Sadie 3 Disk Editor restoration project on its own thread on the main forum as to not spam this thread to hard, link is above!

I wish we'd know what commercial releases were done with these old DAW.

https://www.factmag.com/2016/10/01/t...-modern-music/