Also, if I were to ever teach a recording course, your final project is this:

You get a 57 or 58 as your One Good Mic and three Radio Shack mics or equivalent. Some cords, a four-track and a tape deck from your uncle's old stereo or equivalent to mix/bounce down to. You can only use guitar gear or stuff cannibalized from a stereo for effects. (And no cheating and using Eventide/TC/Moog/boutiquey shit either; Electro-Harmonix is pushing it and will make me evaluate more critically.) Now convince me you rock , tough guy.

I've done it too.

Shit, man. That's slick that it'll actually bring in all the inputs. Over USB 2? I didn't even know that was possible to send/return sixteen. I know you can do it over Firewire, but that is an unusual device that'll do it on USB. It begs the question "why isn't there more stuff that will do this (without some sort of additional interface/expansion)", because getting a rock band in "right" in the halfway-modern sense in on eight is... pushing it.

...and once in the 'puter, you can split the stereo channels anyhow.

Re: the Zed R16, Chris from Garda and I have been going back and forth, with him at times playing Devil's Advocate for my not getting one. I don't know if it's part his wanting me to pick up a Shiva or Bad Cat or the like first or part him playing to my gearsnobness and going "hold out for better" (more routing on a Midas Venice, bitchin' EQ on a Toft ATB, the odd score of something someone wants to move quick) or just the "you don't enough outboard anymore to justify having a board; there are other ways to patch things in". I might try it anyhow because I can send it back if it doesn't deliver.

I think that developers were just not exploring what USB2.0 could do much at all, because USB1.0 was the "cheap one" and firewire was the "easy multi-channel" one. Now that USB1.0 is kind of useless for new application designs(well, more pointless, really) and firewire has turned out to be a bit of a compatibility/support headache, i think that lots of manufacturers are going to start showing up with devices based around more inputs over a USB2.0 connection.

As an aside, the thing with all of those popular 8-channel firewire interfaces that i always found frustrating, is that the bunch of them that are based on the DICEII chipset(which is like, a LOT of them, from the alesis, to the presonus, to the focusrite, etc etc...) : that chipset is actually designed for 32 channels i/o! And as far as i am aware only one interface even used sixteen analog inputs out of all of those(the Presonus Firestudio Tube). All that capability, and no one made any use of it. I think that this may also be what the case has been with USB2.0, that it is capable of more than companies were providing in their products. I would be curious to see what the maximum number of channels the USB2.0 connection is capable of. Surely is has a lot to do with the processing and memory power of the computer it is used with, but i wonder what those numbers actually work out to be.

Like, i don't know if the USB2.0 is capable of doing MORE than sixteen channels, and i don't believe it has the same wide-open daisy-chaining capabilities that firewire provides, but anyhow for one shot, sixteen inputs, it seems to work. And that would about do it for my basic needs. [It is worth noting that i am not really seeing it as an interface, but rather a functional hardware/driver package: i intend to gut the thing and make a simple fourteen-proper-preamp frankenbeast of it.]

But yeah, i do think that more companies will start rolling out new stuff, with more analog inputs, in USB2.0 formats, probably as they reach the end of the current firewire-based lines' sellable lives.




I hear what he is saying, but at the same time, those other mixers are really in a totally different price bracket. If you are going to be talking about spending $5k+, you actually have several different solutions you could look at, IMO. For the cost of this A&H jobber, there isn't a lot that will provide similar functionality/quality that i know of.

I guess it depends a lot on what your current needs are, what your timeframe of need for acquiring something is, and what exactly you want the board to do for you.

Re: boards, I agree. There's really nothing else that does quite what this does in the price range, and honestly for the price a 24 channel Allen & Heath with a 16+2 Firewire interface and DAW control is a steal. You'd have to hunt down deals on individual bits pretty hard to do better for the money, if one could. And by all accounts it's not sonically their low-end board jacked into a couple Firepods either (and one could do worse than that, easily!) with a DAW controller tacked on. Added on to my existing setup, that's eight channels of drums (kick, snare, 2 toms, OH & room) plus nine stereo stems (or additional mono shizzle for things like bass or lead vox) if I utilize the two-track in and assign it to the main mix too (and I have inserts on 9 & 10 out of the Focusrite...) and that's before bringing the ADAT interface into play to get 32-34 channels back...

I figure the extra $3k could pick up nice mics or compressors or things that would make a greater qualitative difference; the board itself at that point is pretty respectable as are the converters. One can pick up an AKG 414 or a Bock 195 for well under $1k used, or maybe a Royer; Neumann, Telefunken and the like starts to show up on the radar there, along with every dynamic mic you could ever want, as do all sorts of fun compressors. Hell, for $1k on Craigslist I could get a piano (and Jen plays the piano as well, all jazz-style-like. The only problem is getting it up the stairs. Don't think we're not tempted.), a Hammond M3 and a viola in here...

Re: the rest, I'm going to bed and will answer at work tomorrow.