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MGR/Jack Uvoltreed « Tascam MX-2424 »
Published on 10/31/01 at 15:00I'm a beta tester for Timeline Vista, the company that developed the MX for Tascam. I plan to purchase this unit when the testing is complete because I am very impressed with it's performance overall.
This hardware has got a V-8 under the hood! I tried doing home recording using soundcards and building my own DAW using over the counter software but even with lots of memory and a reasonably fast system I ran into problems with dropouts and freezes that were too huch hassle. With the MX-2424, I can do a ton of editing on a 24 track, 24-bit 44100 or 48000 Hz project and it never gives me a hiccup or long delays. I could record at 96000 Hz sample rates too if I wanted to but for me that's overkill. The analog to digital converters are very high quality and give great sound.
The latest feature, a new GUI called MX-View, hasn't been released to the public yet because it's in the beta test phase, but I can tell you in all honesty, it's incredible! You can run the MX remotely with meters and do your tracking then do editing super fast. You can record many virtual tracks and quickly compile the best takes from each track to a new virtual track. You can render all your clips when done editing to make it easy to import into other music software at a specific time or if you use Logic Audio you'll soon be able to spot audio directly utilizing the Open-TL standard. If you don't have a digital mixer the MX-View software lets you do volume automation and you can mix down to two tracks to burn to a CD on the SPDIF output. I may take my tracks back into an audio program on my PC to add effects later but I can get a ton of work done using this new GUI and the MX-2424.
Before they had the MX-View GUI they had a product called ViewNet which didn't have all that many features and was slower so I wasn't using the MX as I am now. It would be nice if it could work with IDE drives instead of SCSI because the SCSI drives cost more but I guess it probably wouldn't be able to perform as well as it does with the SCSI.
This thing is rock solid! The buttons have a good feel and with the thousands of times I have pushed them I have never had an error where the button didn't work right. As I said before the sound quality is excellent and the synchronization and clock are so good you'll want to use the MX as your clock source. The unit will lock to just about anything and apart from the music industry this product is also heavily used in film-making and audio dubbing. Multiple units can chase one another to enable real-time recording of many instruments such as recording a full symphony.
The MX-2424 competes with a couple of other products some for less money and some for more but it is purchased by professionals over the other units available because of it's quality and reliability. When previous owners get their hands on the new GUI, MX-View they just aren't going to believe all the extra features that have been added and how well it works. If you want to work quickly and feel confident in your recording hardware to keep up with you to get the work done without problems, then you have to evaluate the MX-2424 for yourself. You won't regret it!
This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com
This hardware has got a V-8 under the hood! I tried doing home recording using soundcards and building my own DAW using over the counter software but even with lots of memory and a reasonably fast system I ran into problems with dropouts and freezes that were too huch hassle. With the MX-2424, I can do a ton of editing on a 24 track, 24-bit 44100 or 48000 Hz project and it never gives me a hiccup or long delays. I could record at 96000 Hz sample rates too if I wanted to but for me that's overkill. The analog to digital converters are very high quality and give great sound.
The latest feature, a new GUI called MX-View, hasn't been released to the public yet because it's in the beta test phase, but I can tell you in all honesty, it's incredible! You can run the MX remotely with meters and do your tracking then do editing super fast. You can record many virtual tracks and quickly compile the best takes from each track to a new virtual track. You can render all your clips when done editing to make it easy to import into other music software at a specific time or if you use Logic Audio you'll soon be able to spot audio directly utilizing the Open-TL standard. If you don't have a digital mixer the MX-View software lets you do volume automation and you can mix down to two tracks to burn to a CD on the SPDIF output. I may take my tracks back into an audio program on my PC to add effects later but I can get a ton of work done using this new GUI and the MX-2424.
Before they had the MX-View GUI they had a product called ViewNet which didn't have all that many features and was slower so I wasn't using the MX as I am now. It would be nice if it could work with IDE drives instead of SCSI because the SCSI drives cost more but I guess it probably wouldn't be able to perform as well as it does with the SCSI.
This thing is rock solid! The buttons have a good feel and with the thousands of times I have pushed them I have never had an error where the button didn't work right. As I said before the sound quality is excellent and the synchronization and clock are so good you'll want to use the MX as your clock source. The unit will lock to just about anything and apart from the music industry this product is also heavily used in film-making and audio dubbing. Multiple units can chase one another to enable real-time recording of many instruments such as recording a full symphony.
The MX-2424 competes with a couple of other products some for less money and some for more but it is purchased by professionals over the other units available because of it's quality and reliability. When previous owners get their hands on the new GUI, MX-View they just aren't going to believe all the extra features that have been added and how well it works. If you want to work quickly and feel confident in your recording hardware to keep up with you to get the work done without problems, then you have to evaluate the MX-2424 for yourself. You won't regret it!
This review was originally published on http://www.musicgearreview.com