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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

The Diskovery Channels
by Roger Nichols

Last month I talked about tape versus hard disc recording. This month I have found a new product that may do what I thought Sony was going to do; build a machine that would finally replace tape with hard disk storage.

Alesis has announced a new 24-track hard disk recorder. It is two rack units high, has optical ADAT in and out, analog 24 bit in and out, ADAT sync connections and two drive bays in the front for removable drives. The box is 96kHz capable with external converters (feeding the ADAT optical inputs) and can perform edits without a video screen or external computer. There is also an Ethernet port for transferring files directly to your DAW. When connected to a BRC it shows up as three ADATs.

What makes this unit so different from all of the rest? The way the data is stored on hard disk. All other hard disk recording systems use a random access file system to store the audio. Each piece of audio has a name that makes it unique so that the software program knows where to place the audio file in the song. To go one step further, the software program can denote regions of the audio file and place them anywhere it wants. These regions are basically aliases of portions of the same audio file.

In the computer program, which is the only place you have access to the audio, you can arrange the regions wherever you want. There can be software errors that place these regions wherever the computer wants. If this happens, the exact timing relationship between tracks is corrupt.
On high budget projects like Steely Dan, we use the Sony 3348 48 track digital tape machine as the master. The tracks are recorded on tape so that they can’t move. We bounce things over to ProTools to work on them, but we move everything back to tape as the master. On lower budget projects I make backups to ADAT for timing reference. I can always dump the tape back into ProTools to make sure everything is still lined up. This is much more time consuming, but it works.

In the new Alesis 24 track machine the hard disk is formatted with a proprietary system that makes it work just like tape. All of the space on the hard disk is allotted to audio ahead of time. If you have inserted a 90-minute disk, it will record 90 minutes of 24 tracks, but it will only record 90 minutes of 2 tracks. Just like a piece of tape. If you want to copy chorus one to chorus two, it is pasted in the hole that is already there in the second chorus. If you make an edit to the song, it works just like cutting the tape with a razor blade. That segment is skipped over during playback.

The tracks can’t slip in time like they can with a normal hard disk recording system. For me, this is the first step in actually replacing tape with herd disk or optical disk storage. It’s about time!

New Apples
Apple has announced its annual crop of new Macs. The lineup includes a single processor G4 at 733 MHz, Gigabit Ethernet, five PCI slots, faster AGP video acceleration, and a DVD-R recorder. Eat my socks! You can get optional software to author DVD videos that include AC-3 encoding. The DVD will play back your movie with Dolby Digital surround on your DVD player.

On top of that the announced a new 500 MHz G4 laptop mad out of Titanium that is only one inch thick. The screen is 15.2” diagonally, but only as high as the 14.1” screen. With a resolution of 1152 by 768 this is now a wide screen display for playback of DVD movies, and room for more ProTools waveforms.

Notice that the new G4 has five slots instead of four. This means that you can host a 24|Mix Plus system without adding an expansion chassis. Three cards for the Mix Plus, one card for SCSI, and one slot for the AGP video board.
Gigabit Ethernet marks the start of project studio networking that is affordable. I was able to record 48 tracks of audio in ProTools to the Server hard disk mounted on my desktop. This means that you can share hard disks among multiple computers. I use one computer to edit and master stereo and surround audio. Another computer is used for all of the multi-track 24|Mix Plus AV stuff. I mount the disk of the mastering computer on the desktop of the 24|Mix Plus computer. When I bounce to disk, I bounce to the mastering disk. Ethernet takes care of the transfer without interfering with the work at hand. The mastering computer can be burning CD-Rs at the same time without a hiccup. Things are starting to get good.

Surround This
The most difficult part of surround mixing is the monitoring. If you are using a professional studio with a million dollar console setup for surround, then you are lucky. If you are trying to do surround mixes on a Neve 8078 (like we did for Steely Dan) or you are trying to do surround mixes in your project studio, then you are up the creek without a paddle.
There are a lot of small consoles that let you mix surround. Some of them require that you use some of the aux outputs to feed the additional monitors. This works in a pinch, but how do you listen back to the mix you just printed? What if you need to listen to the stereo CD to make sure you are in the same ballpark as the original mix? How do you calibrate all of the speaker levels? What if you have full range speakers but no subwoofer? What if you have a subwoofer but your main speakers don’t reproduce enough lows?
I found the box to solve all of my monitoring problems. The Martinsound MultiMax EX is a monitor control box. You can select from multiple surround sources and multiple stereo sources. You can even set the system up for 7.1 monitoring if your needs are so inclined. The system has built-in pink noise generation to help set up speaker levels. After calibration, an easy twist of the volume pot displays the sound level in dB. A built-in bass management system compensates for speaker low-end deficiencies and automatically switches on the correct speakers for the source being monitored.

To me good speakers make the difference in a final mix. Good monitoring control makes just as much of an impact on your workflow and the quality of your final product.

Driveway.com
Have you ever tried to e-mail a file larger than 5 megabytes? This happens when you try to send and audio track to a friend a full bandwidth. None of the e-mail servers will accept it. I found a new way! A Web site called driveway.com will give you 25 megabytes of ftp storage for free. You can purchase space up to 525 megabytes for really big files. You upload your files to your account at driveway.com and enter a password for download authorization. You then e-mail the location and password to the recipient. He then goes to the ftp site, enters the password and downloads the file. Perfect.

Also I got an e-mail that Rocket Network is upgrading their site to make it easier to use for those of you sharing files between distant computers. Rocket Network allows more than one person to work on the same audio files by storing them on a Web site.

Guitar players in LA, keyboards in London, didgeridoos in Sidney… the world is getting smaller. Does that mean I will have less room to store all of my cool stuff?