Building the BEST setup for my equipment

[mrhappy]

Shit, I am a year older and my studio isn't finished yet.

I feel your pain Protools5LEGuy! Have been trying to get things sorted out here too... putting in a serious push but mostly cleaning, organizing, etc... not the fun stuff! Testing some expansion chassis/ components ... DP500 wouldn't start tho... power light briefly lights but then immediately fades out. Haven't looked into this yet. Just acquired a 1" 16 track reel to reel that I'm trying to integrate and yes I'm out of my diapers!! Haha!

[Protools5LEGuy]

Update. Achieved/To DOs/reminder for myself.

Adquired a GHz PB 17" and maxed out with mSATA and 2 Gig'o'RAM. My only machine that boots 9+Panther+Tiger+Leo now. It uses an original M-Box and
it has almost All protools LE iterations (5.2.1 on 9, 6.4 on Pant., 7.4 on Tiger and 8.0.1cs on Leo) Cant find 6.7 that is needed to upgrade to 6.9 on Panther Realized M-Box is a shit compared to AM-III or Digi 001. No 128 samples of latency to work means too much to play live anything. So I decided to get a firewire cheap modern card ...

Bought a M-audio AP firewire this week, waiting it to come.

Shit, I need a fw-800 to 400 cable adapter to use it on 9...  and Logic 8+9 should be installed too.


My MDD boots Panther and serves files to all my machines with a 10/100 switch  . Added a 1Terabyte 7200rpm drive with  an 40 pin ATA to SATA converter. An Edirol UM-1. Also has Protools 6.2.3 LE with an Audiomedia III with lots of Virtual Instruments from this same forum! In most of our ISOs we give love to jaguar and panther users. Sampletank 2 and PlugSound are stable there more than in Mac OS 9.     

At the end 777 is right, I am a troll! 

The SawTooth 1.8 7447 dual is on Panther and has now my Digi 001 + Seritek s2e4. PT 6.4 Le. Maybe i should try to clone the Tiger Partition from the PB to it and search for the 001+core audio+Logic 8 alternative or even Leo+logic 9... but not on my list of first to do right now.

Downgraded to just 1 intel machine with SL and ptHD 10 + focusrite LS56 (Master DAW). Thinking of trying el crapitan+fwAudioPhile, maybe for a modern kontakt access/logicX.

iMac G3 Indigo should downgrade the m-box protools it has installed to be protools free and use the internal mic to record riffs + or the line in + WavesPAZ Analizer to see the mix from main DAW.

[DieHard]

Downgraded to just 1 intel machine with SL and ptHD 10 + focusrite LS56 (Master DAW). Thinking of trying el crapitan+fwAudioPhile, maybe for a modern kontakt access/logicX.

Just helped a "friend of a friend" acquire a Liquid Safire two months ago and swapped out his Digi003 Pus XLR (which he used on every album for the last 8 years); he said the 003 was "the bomb", I told him the Safire IMO would be a noticeable upgrade... anyway, he called me yesterday, to tell me the drums are tracking with a noticeable better quality, for the price-range, I doubt anything can touch the LS series; they record extremely clean, uncolored (as far as EQ), and don't overload as easy as the Digi's. 

For bedroom studios, I have another friend that swears by his FW M-Box pro, I never used one, but always thought it had very good specs... I will buy one and test it out one day since they are dirt cheap now.

[WhiteWarlock]

silly question:
can you upgrade the TL074's in Digi001 preamps easily(sockets)
with something like BurrBrown OPA4134 and/or MC33079?
(have Digi001 piped for ADAT & some extra BB 4134s from upgrading compressors)
ssm2017s for ssm2019 or BB INA217 in the Mic preamps?
this is What BLA mod was for Digi001...
Analog Stages + Mic Pres
We approach the 001’s analog stages in two ways. Although there isn’t much in the way of replacements for the TL074, we’ve chosen the OPA4134 as an upgrade. For the microphone preamps, we replace the SSM2017’s with a pair of our proprietary high-speed discrete instrumentation circuits. You’ll find that they will compete with many high-end microphone preamps.

[WhiteWarlock]

Would the TL074/SSM2017 upgrade mods presented help make any real audible quality difference (reduced noise floor issue) with the Digi001?

[Astroman]

I don't know the circuit diagram of the Digi-01, so guessing he's talking about the TL74 in the line path. For connection of regular gear it's not a showstopper imho (say a DX-7 or some Drumsynth).
The TL74 may not be the most noisefree component, but is sometimes described as a kind of 'musical' opamp. Not all amplification is about clinical precision. I've spotted them in expensive bass amplifiers (Genz Benz).

The SSM2017 (a micpre on-a-chip, not an opamp) also has a nice 'musical' sound, but in this position the lack of resolution is much more obvious.
I've compared it (in a channel of a Soundcraft mixer) with an Audient discrete mic channel, using 2 identical mics.
Would have liked to keep the mixer, but the difference was too significant.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Just bought an Mac Pro 1.1 to have all my PowerPC machines file served and unified

So what's the plan??

My best machine still is a Quad Extreme hackintosh that show himself as a Xeon 3.0 Mac Pro 3.1 with 4 GBytes RAM

The plan is the usual. To convert the Mac Pro 1.1 with  only 2 Dual Cores 2.0 GHz and 2.5 GBytes of RAM in a 2.1 with 2 Quad Cores at 3.0GHz and 32 GBytes RAM. The RAM will come in 2 weeks. The processors, from China can take a month.

The graphics card from the Mac Pro was screwed. Couldnt finish a Lion Install. Then I began to remember that Lion could use PC Graphics cards. Started looking and found 2 nvidias: a silent 210 with 1 GBytes of DDR3 and another silent 9400 GT with 512 MBytes (Double the original 7300). Both are now in the Mac Pro.

it´s for his collection of shopping lists in simpletext format.

The Album of my band is on Snow Leopard/PT 10, and I decided years ago to finish in that platform. If all my Snow Leopard/PT 10 plugin colection + the eventually new ones I end up finding this month for RTAS that still run on Lion will have to do the work. If it doesnt, I will have to finish it with the Hackintosh.

So, now until RAM arrives I have made a Logic 9.1.8 install with all (or most) of the Logic X sound library via Pacifist.

I think it works, at least my EXS-24 mk2 test on Lion confirm that.

The plan is to see how far away in versions would those Logic X sound library work. I mean, if those can work in Logic 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 as I see them working on 9.1.8 on Lion.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Just bought an Mac Pro 1.1 to have all my PowerPC machines file served and unified

So what's the plan??

The plan is keep using the Protools 10 where it still runs (on Mac) and rediscover Logic 9 on Intel Lion will serve me until I decide if I get an Snow Leopard Card.

My future projects will probably be Win 10/Protools 12 platform, but with all my G4 farm around and the Yosemite on the hackintosh with PT 10 and Logic X.

[IIO]

you forgot to mention your OS9 machines.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Last sunday I went 35 Km away to pick a broken MDD Uni 1.25 with Radeon 9000 128 Mb and a Sonnet FW 400 card. Also a broken Samsung PSU. Ad no drives. And 1 pound of dust.


That model is 166 bus (at last!) and I have been fighting until today with 10 ATA drives (only 5 past SMART) to get clones of Instant DAW and clones of my PB 17" installs that include Panther and Leopard.

I borrowed my G4 Sawtooth 1.8 dual with a Digi 001 to a drummer to allow him record 16 tracks at once using his behringer 8 ins+ADAT.

you forgot to mention your OS9 machines.

PowerPC:


G4 MDD 867 Dual Mac OS 9/Panther Audiomedia III

G4 DA GHz Dual Mac OS 9/Panther Digi 001

G4 MDD 1.25 Mac OS9/Panther/Leopard Sonorus STUDI/O M-Box

PowerBook G4 GHz 17" Mac OS9/Panther/Tiger/Leopard shares the M-Box and the M-Audio FW duo


My most used cards are still the FW Solo+FW Audiophile + Focusrite LS56 that go with an

Intel

i5 2500K oc 3.4GHz nVidia 730 Win 10 64 (Planning on go Capitan soon) Protools 10+12

Mac Pro 2.1 2xQuad 3.0 8GB RAM nVidia 210, 9400, 7300 Lion + El Capitan (Planning on go Win 10 soon). Protools 10

All those machine are actives and running.


For the future decide to use the SONORUS Studi/o on a maxed Windows XP and build a system with W98/WMe around a Guillemot Maxi Sound ISIS that have an onboard 4 Mb sampler and a fine I/O box.

I have board+cpu+heatsink+RAM :

3 Intel 775 Quads to fulfill that but also

board+cpu+heatsink :

2 Pentium D, 2 Pentium IV a Pentium III and a Pentium 2

But only 2 good ATX 12cm fans boxes, 3 old PSU and no money to invest on drives till.


Next week I hope to send recycling all Pentium  D and below If I get a stable W98 Setup for the ISIS.

[smilesdavis]

mac os 9?

g4 mdd dual
digidesign mix core + 3 farm
888/24 io on each
zsys router
use as dsp box running logic

[Protools5LEGuy]

Time to update.

A year ago I changed 20 artisan beers to a Sweeden guy and he sent me his Mac Pro 3.1 2.8GHz

The producers that help me finish my band album forced me to move to El Capitan (from Lion) to have the latest Protools 10 chance. I am happy with El Capitan on my 2 Mac Pro

After years of bullying from the members of this forum to became an TDM user finally this week got an offer I could not refuse.

A SBS pci expansion box with 2 DSP farms and an D24 card for 20 Euros made me rethink the LE thing. It is missing the host card and the SCSI cable, but for the 20 bucks I still consider it interesting. The SBS can be retrofitted as a good PC box.

Then an original ADAT bridge (20 bit by ADAT but 24 bits thru SPDIF) for 45 Euros.

And finally 3 cables for the cards for 50 bucks (It would costs a lot more if it werent second hand).

Aside this Protools 24 rig that I am wishing to install on a MDD 1.25 mono, I bought last month an Apogee GiO (to play a little with Mainstage).

Also a RME Multiface (original, not the Multiface II). The seller of the RME sent me almost every card on the market to use it. I mean a PCI, a CardBus and a ExpressCard 34 and a Cardbus to expresscard converter. I plan to install a pciexpress to expresscard converter on my MacPro 3.1. That thing will come in October.

I guess the best wordclock would come from the RME or the Focusrite LS 56

I guess I should avoid the 20 bits D/A conversion on the ADAT bridge and send the SPDIF from that unit to the RME or the Focusrite.

I guess I should add a MIX Core or a MIX Farm to my Protools 24 setup just because MIX gear is faster and have x6 Motorola instead of x4 Motorola

Also in PT 5.1.3 you can use both types of cards. AFAIK there are plugs that only work on MIX cards that I cant use right now.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Before all this new gear I had Protools 10 HD on the Mac Pro 2.1 with a FW M-Audio (Solo or Audiophile) sending SPDIF to the LS56 conected to the Mac Pro 3.1

On the 3.1 I have Hi Jack running Sonarworks for room correction. I also use it to record Youtube or Spotify (Played on the 2.1).

The easy upgrade would be to use the wordclock from the RME to the focusrite but it could produce bigger jitter.



                   

[IIO]

A year ago I changed 20 artisan beers to a Sweeden guy and he sent me his Mac Pro 3.1 2.8GHz

i have the same. used only for testing / software development but eventually one day i will use it for mixing with poco.

it is much slower but maybe i get of the Xserve soon and use the 5.1 for video rendering also.

a good mac pro 3.1 2010/2012 is nowadays almost cheaper than a good G4 quicksilver.

of course my G4 will remain the core system of my multi(12!)computer setup for all times.

[DieHard]

a good mac pro 3.1 2010/2012 is nowadays almost cheaper than a good G4 quicksilver.

of course my G4 will remain the core system of my multi(12!)computer setup for all times.

The 3.1 is 2008 and a bear to re-arctic silver, also only DDR2.  The best buy these days for a more modern "native" setup for PT10 or Logic Pro X is a 2010 4,1 Single CPU.  These are incredible audio machines and use DDR3 and are easier to re-paste CPU. You can score then for around $200 or even less sometimes.

With the 4,1 you can...
1) Burn it to a 5,1
2) Then Upgrade firmware to support NVMe M.2 boot via a PCI card, HD speeds of about 2K read & write
3) Upgrade CPU to 6 Core 3.06 for about $25

[IIO]

oh sorry, mine is a 5.1 of course... i keep mixing those numbers.

the nehalem and westlake boards from 2010 are not the fastest horse either (and limited to a max of 48 RAM.. maybe you remember... the 4*8 or 3*16 thing) - but you can get them for 250 bucks, where the 12 core top model late 2012 goes for 600+.

for protools or poco or even photoshop jobs you probably will never need anything better in your life, you just sit back and work and laugh about people who spend 15,000 for the next M2 übercomputer.

[IIO]

they also sell those EFI chips you can solder yourself. you probably know about these things, i wouldnt dare and rather use a software solution.^^

[Protools5LEGuy]

[url]https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B071ZDS4CB/url]

[smilesdavis]

oh sorry, mine is a 5.1 of course... i keep mixing those numbers.

the nehalem and westlake boards from 2010 are not the fastest horse either (and limited to a max of 48 RAM.. maybe you remember... the 4*8 or 3*16 thing) - but you can get them for 250 bucks, where the 12 core top model late 2012 goes for 600+.

for protools or poco or even photoshop jobs you probably will never need anything better in your life, you just sit back and work and laugh about people who spend 15,000 for the next M2 übercomputer.

had a 5.1 sold it regretted it ever since. now the trashcans are getting cheaper might pick one of those up eventually.

[tunedbytad]

My $.02

their are tiers / zones / happy combos that make a good sounding "stable" productive PT Rig

by age

PT 5.1.3 OS9 MDD w/ Sata Mix Plus min two cards min 888 882 1622 i/o

PT 10 HD Win7 NVME reg edit min two HD cards PCIe or PCIX 192/92 i/o

PT 12.7 HX High Sierra or better 1 card min 192 and newer i/o

PT 2022 any of the current $1500US and up macs w/ interface of choice and subscriptions :-(
*call Sweetwater swipe the card charge it to the game.

Each have pros and cons
some cost more some cost less
but these are the stable tiers as I see it

I just burned thru my vacation time and a undisclosed amount of money trying to prove out a PT5.3.1 HD rig.
there are tiers and combos that are not so good to peruse
*I reserve the right to change my mind at any time your mileage my vary