Recording Handbook - Hol.gr

Unfortunately, Syquest is out of business as of summer '99 , so Iomega doesn't really have any
competition and can charge what they want. There is a new removeable drive out there called the Orbit
that looks a lot like the Syquest Sparq. It holds 2.2gig per cartridge and they're also about $35 apiece.
CD-r's and CD-rw's: 12x speed cd-r's are now in the $300 range! They can be SCSI or IDE as well. Bulk
cd-r's on a spindle are down to $.20 each. Get a decent inkjet, do your own labels and make your own cd's
one at a time; voila, instant record label. I picked up an 8x SCSI cd-r for $200 in Nov.99. I actually have a
2x SCSI cd-r and the 8x SCSI cd-r both installed on my system. I have some old backup software that
works with the 2x cd-r and I use the 8x for burning cd's. I love burning a 50 minute cd in 8 minutes!
CD-rw is great for backing up your files. It looks like another hard drive to the computer and you can
reuse the medium. The physical cd's are more expensive, but it's a no-brainer.
The Soundcard: This is the device that gets the sound into and out of the computer. There are lots of
soundcards out there and you need to pick the right one for doing what you want to do. Again, go to the
maufacturers' websites. Make sure the software that you have picked will work with the soundcard you're
looking at. The software should list soundcards that have been tested and work correctly with it.
Don't get a card that only has digital in/outs unless you have a DAT machine or other box that reads a
digital signal. There are two flavors of digital in/out. One is S/PDIF which uses an RCA style connector
(like your cassette deck) and the other is AES/EBU which uses a cannon connector (like a microphone
cable). Some cards have one, some have both. You can't plug them into your home stereo and hear them!
Whether its simply for stereo editing or full blown multi-track recording, get a soundcard with at least a
stereo analog monitor output so when all the digital bells and whistles quit on you, you can plug this into
your stereo and hear what the hell is going on OR not going on!
A Word About Wordclock: If you're only using the computer to record and mix on, this doesn't apply to
you. If on the other hand, you're planning on using the computer with other digital divices such as ADAT's
or DA-88's, or a digital mixer like the Panasonic DA7 or Yamaha 02R, then this is very important to you.
All digital devices have computers inside them running their own internal digital clocks. To work properly
together, there has to be a MASTER WORDCLOCK device with all the others being connected to it.
When you start to interconnect them and move the digital audio between devices, and don't properly
connect the wordclock ins and outs, these different digital clocks begin to cause problems which can
include pops and clicks, random noise, timing discrepancies, audio drift or no audio at all. Furthermore,
different combinations of digital equipment will require some experimentation as to which particular
device should be the wordclock master.
The Drivers: These are little software programs that communicate with the operating system, be it Win95,
Win98, NT or Win3.11 and facilitate the smooth interaction between your H/W and S/W. Win95 had a
ver. 1 and a version 2 as did Windows 98 and now we have Windows 2000 to contend with. You need to
make sure that your software and hardware BOTH are supported by whatever version of Windows is on
your computer.
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