Well, I started out with analog tape, moving through various 4 track reel machines, and then on to a (used) Tascam 1/2" 8 track (impossible to keep running because of Teac/Tascam's disregard for their customers -- I never even filled up a whole tape in the year and a half I had it before I just gave up on it.
After that I moved to ADAT and it was great to use something that actually worked -- most of the time. At the time it was simply amazing to have an 8 track recorder that fit in a 3 RU space. I added another one after a couple of years -- and then when Windows 95 added a multi-track audio layer, I made the jump buying a Frontier ADAT-I/O interface card for my PC.
I'd been synchronizing the ADATs to my Win 3.1 based MasterTracks Pro MIDI sequencer and that was pretty cool -- but when Cakewalk came out in '96 with multi-track audio for Win95 (and MasterTracks, which came over from the Mac, seemed to drop off the map), I used the ADAT's for their converters for 8 in / 8 out DAW recording.
And, brother, I never looked back.
I never started another ADAT project after my first direct-to-HD project. What was the point?
Tape was a pain to work with. You had to worry about rewinding. Should I disengage the head before I rewind. Oh, I ran out of tracks. I better bust out another ten dollar cassette and do some ping ponging... do I dare to record over that when I'm done... no, better save the tracks, just to be safe. Uh, oh, the tape format's going funny. Better clone the tape onto a new cassette. Oh, shoot. My heli-scan head's wearing out. Time for a new head assembly... (well, I never go that far but I was pretty close... things were definitely getting hinky when by the time I started working to HD... and THEN, the damn ADATs, which were no longer used for tape -- just conversion -- decided to blink out. One. Then the other.)
Are you really sure that an ADAT is going to be cheaper?
What's a basic model cost? $800? [Oh, and that gives me pain, since my first one cost me almost full price, $4K !!! ] For 800 or so you can build a pretty kick ass production machine (well, we're talking 2.4 gHz -- not 3 -- and your existing monitor -- not a 19" flat panel -- but you get the idea) with a decent sound card (an Echo, M-Audio, etc) whose 24 bit converters are going to potentially blow the pantaloons off the 20 bit converters in the ADAT. You'll be able to work with a big ol' slug of tracks -- not just 8. You won't ever have to rewind. (I can't tell you the feeling when I realized how profoundly I hated rewind time when I got the HD thing going.) Editing on a single ADAT is impossible. You need to bounce from ADAT to ADAT or onto a HD (and then you need an ADAT lightpipe i/o interface in your PC at that)
I loved my ADATs for the 4 years or so that I used them. But, like I said, once I'd worked on the HD -- I never went back.
[After yet another long-winded post, I realized I didn't really have time to read the other posts right now but I did see the second one, which mentions plug-ins. Since, when my ADATs finally died completely and I switched to a 2 channel Echo Mia, I had to change my mixing style to in-the-box mixing (I used use my 8 channels as sets of submixes mixed in real time with one or more of my 3 synths and my drum module). At first, it was a little hard to get used to... but then I realized that, even on my primordial Pentium 3-500, I could still milk a fair number of tracks with a whole bunch of plug-ins... and all of a sudden I realized just how great plug-ins are. I have a handful of hardware compressors and a few multi-fx boxes, but I always have had to sort of not get carried away or I'd run out of gear. With plug-ins you can virtually clone a 'piece of gear' over and over... if you need 16 channels of simultaneous compression and you've go the horsepower to sustain it, it's as easy as a few clicks. Can't do that with hardware. Anyhow, now I really am out of time! ]
[I hardly ever put up pix of my little hole in the wall, but here's a couple blurry shots of my rig (not seen are another PC and an Alesis QS6 and a Kawai K4).
After that I moved to ADAT and it was great to use something that actually worked -- most of the time. At the time it was simply amazing to have an 8 track recorder that fit in a 3 RU space. I added another one after a couple of years -- and then when Windows 95 added a multi-track audio layer, I made the jump buying a Frontier ADAT-I/O interface card for my PC.
I'd been synchronizing the ADATs to my Win 3.1 based MasterTracks Pro MIDI sequencer and that was pretty cool -- but when Cakewalk came out in '96 with multi-track audio for Win95 (and MasterTracks, which came over from the Mac, seemed to drop off the map), I used the ADAT's for their converters for 8 in / 8 out DAW recording.
And, brother, I never looked back.
I never started another ADAT project after my first direct-to-HD project. What was the point?
Tape was a pain to work with. You had to worry about rewinding. Should I disengage the head before I rewind. Oh, I ran out of tracks. I better bust out another ten dollar cassette and do some ping ponging... do I dare to record over that when I'm done... no, better save the tracks, just to be safe. Uh, oh, the tape format's going funny. Better clone the tape onto a new cassette. Oh, shoot. My heli-scan head's wearing out. Time for a new head assembly... (well, I never go that far but I was pretty close... things were definitely getting hinky when by the time I started working to HD... and THEN, the damn ADATs, which were no longer used for tape -- just conversion -- decided to blink out. One. Then the other.)
Are you really sure that an ADAT is going to be cheaper?
What's a basic model cost? $800? [Oh, and that gives me pain, since my first one cost me almost full price, $4K !!! ] For 800 or so you can build a pretty kick ass production machine (well, we're talking 2.4 gHz -- not 3 -- and your existing monitor -- not a 19" flat panel -- but you get the idea) with a decent sound card (an Echo, M-Audio, etc) whose 24 bit converters are going to potentially blow the pantaloons off the 20 bit converters in the ADAT. You'll be able to work with a big ol' slug of tracks -- not just 8. You won't ever have to rewind. (I can't tell you the feeling when I realized how profoundly I hated rewind time when I got the HD thing going.) Editing on a single ADAT is impossible. You need to bounce from ADAT to ADAT or onto a HD (and then you need an ADAT lightpipe i/o interface in your PC at that)
I loved my ADATs for the 4 years or so that I used them. But, like I said, once I'd worked on the HD -- I never went back.
[After yet another long-winded post, I realized I didn't really have time to read the other posts right now but I did see the second one, which mentions plug-ins. Since, when my ADATs finally died completely and I switched to a 2 channel Echo Mia, I had to change my mixing style to in-the-box mixing (I used use my 8 channels as sets of submixes mixed in real time with one or more of my 3 synths and my drum module). At first, it was a little hard to get used to... but then I realized that, even on my primordial Pentium 3-500, I could still milk a fair number of tracks with a whole bunch of plug-ins... and all of a sudden I realized just how great plug-ins are. I have a handful of hardware compressors and a few multi-fx boxes, but I always have had to sort of not get carried away or I'd run out of gear. With plug-ins you can virtually clone a 'piece of gear' over and over... if you need 16 channels of simultaneous compression and you've go the horsepower to sustain it, it's as easy as a few clicks. Can't do that with hardware. Anyhow, now I really am out of time!
][I hardly ever put up pix of my little hole in the wall, but here's a couple blurry shots of my rig (not seen are another PC and an Alesis QS6 and a Kawai K4).
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simply to raise the question of whether there were subtle differences in productions created from a PC based set up vs. a hardware based set up....similar to the subtle differences of true analog and digital synthesis of analog....not which is better or worse ......I'm not nock'n PC's at all.....lol....thanks for the heads up though.....I'll have to call Akai....