[RWP] chuseing and audio interface for reaper

[Patrick Perdue]

I have one of the Presonus StudioLive 16.4.2 units. Considering it's a digital console, it's not hard to run without seeing it. I've seen much worse. But yeah, any of those other options are, by their nature, easier to operate, regardless if you can see or not. Presonus did a pretty good job of not burying useful things in dumb places, though.
This having been said, either the Mackie Onyx or the A&H Zed stuff are probably better values if you want a solid, flexible audio interface/console combo. The SL gives you a lot of dynamics in the box, which you probably won't be tracking with anyway, but it's nice for other stuff when using it independent of a DAW. You could achieve similar things with the other two boards and a DAW with track templates everywhere, sending things to and from the DAW as individual channel inserts. I've done some of that with plugins that I think are more interesting than the board's on-board dynamics processing. Not that it's bad, but I wanted certain characteristics that I couldn't get with just the SL itself, and it really is nice to be able to just simply plug any virtual effect directly into a physical channel strip like that.

The first analog/firewire combo boards I had, both from Phonic, had 18 individual trackable inputs, one for each of the 16 mono channels, and a two track input which could be assigned to main, a pair of aux sends, or a pair of subgroups, but only a stereo return, like any of the Onyx series smaller than the 1640I, the number of channels and buses being the defining differences with those units. Those Phonic boards fell under the category of "looks nice, sounds good, but doesn't stay that way for long." One of them killed it's firewire controller, the other one had power supply issues. Oh well, that's what I get for buying something with so much I/O and so many features for under $1000, I guess. Had the Mackie Onyx 1640I existed at the time, I probably would have gone with that, but at the time, the Onyx boards required a $400 upgrade to make them firewire capable, and the preamps weren't as nice as they are now.

As it is, I kind of want one of the smaller Onyx boards, maybe the 1220I or something, for road operation when needed. I'd really like the 1640I, but can't really justify it given what I have, and what I'm doing, which all works at the moment.

On Nov 1, 2012, at 8:30 AM, Monkey Pusher <monkeypusher69 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes it's the $11200 to $2000 range but the other zed mixers only give
> you the stereo bus  over USB which is really limiting when trying to
> do multitracking of more than  two tracks at once, otherwise it
> probably wont be much of a bother for you. But there are other cool
> things like using the boards eq as an insert on any track so you have
> knobs instead of a plug in interface and being able to send the
> individual tracks back to teh board for mixdown.  The Mackie 1640i has
> alot of similar features for a bit less and the studio live from
> presounus is another worth while one in this category, but has screens
> and etc on the unit that requires  some memorization for a blind user
> to fully take advantage of.
> 
> On 11/1/12, Kevin Brown <cursebuster at samobile.net> wrote:
>> It is a plug and play,...It has global phantom power,...You're right
>> though,...if you are in the top end of professional recording,...you
>> want to go with the more elaborate units,...then you're talking about $1200,
>> to
>> $200...
>> 
>> But I think those units give you the items you're talking about...
>> 
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