Ideal Firewire front end??

[steveg]

.....It is weird that all these guys are missing this market point. You are doing live recording: you *want* a low freq shelf, and you *want* a limiter...Oops... forgot about this one: Apogee Mini-me, I've seen these going for about $750 on Ebay. Has about everything I want

 

 

http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/minime.php

 

Good call on the MiniMe, this looks nice, I didn't know about it before....

[Lee Flier]

It is weird that all these guys are missing this market point. You are doing live recording: you *want* a low freq shelf, and you *want* a limiter. Most products don't have them. Putting them in the digital path is not that useful to me, since once I have it in digital, I have 1000 other options to use already.

 

 

Agreed, when doing live recordings there's always the odd time when somebody will get too enthusiastic and overload a mic somewhere, even though your levels are good overall, so it's nice to have an analog limiter before the converter, and it's nice to have a hi pass filter in the analog stage too.

[MikeRivers]

 

Agreed, when doing live recordings there's always the odd time when somebody will get too enthusiastic and overload a mic somewhere, even though your levels are good overall, so it's nice to have an analog limiter before the converter, and it's nice to have a hi pass filter in the analog stage too.

I don't disagree with using the tools that make you comfortable IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING and don't create a problem for yourself at mixing time. But when someone starts out a thread with "What's a good . . . ?" and it's a pretty basic gadget, I automatically assume that this is a beginner. Sometimes I'm wrong, but most of the time I'm right. And two of the biggest problems that a beginner has are:

 

So the best advice I can give him is to avoid digging a hole that he doesn't know he has to get out of. You can do your filtering and compression in the DAW, listen to what you've done, and if it doesn't sound right, undo it and try different settings (including none). But once it's printed to a file, it's there and you have to live with it or re-do it.

 

As far as protecting yourself from over-enthusiasm, well sometimes you just need to do a re-take. It's rare that the take is so good that you can never duplicate or better it.

 

So, to temper my response - anyone who doesn't really need an answer is free to do whatever works for them. But beginners should learn the tools before applying them. It's one thing to learn how to set a limiter properly and another to read that it's a good idea to compress vocals 3:1, about 3 dB, do it, and find that it exaggerates some problem that might be better solved with a different tool. Of course any experienced engineer would listen to what any applied processor is doing, but monitoring on a DAW takes another level of understanding, so this all gets pretty complicated. It's not good to start out that way.

 

So you say why not buy the tool even if you aren't going to use it right away? Well, maybe it will turn out not to be the tool you really need. Or maybe it's just not a very good tool.

 

Life gets tedious. Best to stay out of trouble that you can't immediately recognize. A beginner can see that meter go into the red, and you can hear the clipping when you check the playback. But a beginner might not recognize an overly compressed track until the singer goes on tour and won't be back to the studio for three years.

[mandoman]

Edirol makes a few units with onboard analog limiters
in both firewire and usb. (fa66, ua25, ua101).
That's if you are on a budget.

Otherwise, you can't go wrong with the minime since
I guarantee the pre's on that will sound much nicer than
anything edirol has to offer.

I would say unless you think you really need limiting, it's
preferable not to use it and better to set levels correctly from
the get go. Limiters can really color your recordings if
you are not careful (unless of course this is what you want).

[amplayer]

Analog recorders don't have Firewire interfaces, and people who mix through SSL consoles use the compressors for mixdown.

 

 

You are WAY more of an expert than I will ever be in this subject, so I hesitate to respond. Nevertheless, the above statement doesn't make sense to me. Why are the compressors in the SSL channel strips if they're only being used at mixdown? If only for mixdown, you don't need one in every channel, right?