Thread Best A/D converter for my situation, anyone?

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dominicducello

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First post

1 Posted on 02/08/2005 at 14:59:50

I record on 1/2" 8-track reel to reel. I'm looking for a piece of hardware that will allow me to input at least 4 tracks (8 would be better) at a time into cool edit. I would like to have individual control over each track in cool edit, instead of just the 2-track stereo mix, and I don't want to record each song a track or two at a time and put them back together. I don't know much about this. I've been loading mixed songs into cool edit through an 1/8" jack on my sound card and it's o.k. Just want the individual controll over the tracks. I have a decent processor (a 1.1gHz AMD processor in a windows XP based tower) with USB and PCI slots, but think Firewire would be better. Anyone have any suggestions or useful info? all I care about is getting 4 or 8 individual tracks at a time into my computer, but I need help finding the best device.

By the way, what are TRS inputs? Is this any different than gtr cables?

Thanx Dominic

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Sam Spastic

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2 Posted on 02/15/2005 at 09:43:11

Don't know which cards and interfaces Cool Edit supports but maybe you are looking for something like Digidesigns Digi 001 or Digi 002R.

TRS stands for Tip Ring Sleeve. This would be something that looks like a stereo headphone plug but carrying a balanced mono signal.

Guitar plugs will work usually. They short the ring to the sleeve and let you run an unbalanced signal.

dominicducello

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3 Posted on 02/15/2005 at 09:42:28

Thank you so much Sam Spastic. We decided to stay to 2 channels into the computer since we're used to doing so much outside it anyway, with the reel to reel and outboard gear, that we'll just mix into the computer to master there. It'll still be good enough quality. At some point it may become obvious that we need more channels in and then we'll invest. We got an Edirol UA-1x with two RCA ins. Simple, cheap. We'll use that for a while to learn what else we need, if anything.

Thanks for the reply. These forums have been a great help. Well, I suppose it's everyone's experience that's been the help, not the forums....

baggysound

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4 Posted on 06/10/2005 at 19:22:07

depending on your setup (digital external equipment or not) i'd also consider ADAT (8 tracks optical) as a possibility..

the disadvantage of ADAT is primarily it's price and that devices, since this is a digital setup, would need to be synced together

my personal suggestion would be connecting your equipment into a decent d/a a/d converter, running via lightpipe into a ADAT soundcard (i.e. a RME card), but that primarily depends on your current setup/devices

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