"m-audio Firewire 410" Or "egosys Hexa-fire"?, audio recording Options

[connstellation]

Hi,

I'm very much new to audio-recording. So my question is: "What do I need to record a full Bigband?" (+-18 musicians) I already have a Powerbook 1,25 Ghz and Cubase SX.
But now... "M-Audio Firewire 410" or "Egosys Hexa-fire"?
Do I need 16 channels in from the Hexa-fire, to record the bigband or is 2 enough from the M-Audio? I did read something about "Behringer ADA8000 Ultragain Pro 8-Channel A/D D/A Converter" but don't know what to do...

Thx for the help

Brecht

[boze]

20 mics! wow- so what's the customary thing to do in a studio context with that many mics? I guess you need xlr inputs for most of them? if you have a mixer with enough i/o for all your mics then you can go out the mixer into any two channel soundcard but what you lose is the ability to edit the indidual instruments after the recording has been made. you'd need to setup levels, eq, and fx for each track on the mixer before you record the performance.

do people really do this? close-mic an entire bigband and record to discrete tracks?

maybe if you had a few submixers you could use them for each section. for example, 4 mics of a drumkit could all be submixed, ditto a group of mics for the horn sections.

i'll bet my mixer or something like it would be a good choice. i have a yamaha 01v, and the routing seems very flexible to me. it also has 4 aux sends which could be used indivually to carry drums, horns, vocals, bass.

that way you could be recording maybe 8 tracks at once, and four of them could be from the aux outs, two could be the main outs with a mix of stuff from the board, and two could be lead vocal mics going directly into the xlr inputs on the soundcard or something.

maybe something like a MOTU 828 or the HexaFire might be a better bet since you have to potential for so many discrete voices all at once with your bigband.

i guess if i had to buy just one thing it'd be something like the Hexa-fire because of all it's xlr inputs, but some submixing would also come in handy and once you do that the need for a lot of xlr's on your soundcard might not be as great.

i think this question would get better response at the forums at this link http://www.homerecording.com/bbs/

i find that this place is better for mac-centric stuff and homerecording.com is better for engineering stuff.

good luck- it sounds like fun!

This post has been edited by boze: Tue 7 Oct 2003, 21:18