5.5 question

[geezer]

....Got to say that this whole boondoggle is what sent me to Wavelab, and I have not found any serious drawbacks as of yet....I have spent an awful lot of time re-examining converters, dithering and interfaces, but the end result seems to me to be a big improvement, and I can work in 96k, which is becoming an increasing reality for me.

The Wavelab process is very fast and intuitive once you figure it out, and is capable of some incredibly subtle and effective editing, but I do miss the simplicity of MTU for some things, including the non-dithering 24bit-to-16bit math for CD mastering. On my last 2 CDs, however, I found that some specific combinations of processing in Wavelab (with Waves plug-ins) sounded better than the straight math in MTU....For some kinds of music, I might not find this to be true, but, again, this would eliminate the Waves plugins which I have come to rely on for a lot of my mastering....I have just recently bought a hardware version of the Waves L2, however, which could change things. I would like to see how this interfaces with Microeditor (i.e.- Master to 24bit with the L2 and use the math in MTU to get to CD land) as another option for some things......The last CD I did that I felt really worked in MTU was through the old I/O with all the mastering external going to 16bit into the I/O via AES, although I have had success with some straight conversion of 24 bit files prior to this...

I have become attached, as well, to CD text in Wavelab, so this is becoming another obsolescence issue....

I am considering sending in a Krystal and I/O to MTU and seeing if they can integrate me a system on a new computer without losing functionality and all my old files.....It would be nice if this could happen with MicroSync, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, my original workstation has become flakey and I really can't deal with it anymore.....Got any solid computers available, MTU?

[Rich LePage]

Thanks for the update. Keep us posted on how well the hardware L2 works with Krystal, etc - very interesting. I've been using the Waves software L2, but of course to do that requires going outside MTU since the Direct X linkage in Medit never really has worked at all for me.

On the integration with M/Sync, that will probably be a tough one, since it needs a m/board with at least one ISA slot, and those are sure getting to be a rarity. I think that once CPUs got much over 1 gig speed, the motherboard companies all seemed to drop ISA slots. If you find one, let me know, I have a spare brand new Microsync. My other M/Sync system runs on an older Athlon 1.2 gig CPU with (I think) an older Tyan m/board. I have another one too that runs on a today-ancient Intel board with an old P133 CPU in it.
It's fine for what it does, which is mostly laybacks to video, though.

Most of my machines have removable IDE drive sleds, the newer ones also have USB 2 and/or Firewire, so I take drives back/forth between them.
But with many of the older m/boards, trying to add USB 2 to them can be
pretty dicey-- most of the add-on cards try to set up a zillion IRQs and just don't work. Ones with the NEC chipset I've heard work better - I tried a couple with Via chipsets and no-go. Firewire seems easier to add to an older m/board, I was able to do that on 2 machines where I just could not get USB 2 to work. You can buy several combo boxes for big drives that support both USB and Firewire, by the way. I've done that with several DVD burners for data and a few large hard drives like 120 and 200 gigs.

I did find a SCSI to IDE converter board that works with most things and allows you to use an IDE CD drive but connected to a SCSI controller. It seems to work very well with stuff like NTI, Nero, and Roxio, but Micro CD won't find it properly, I tried several diff IDE CDRW drives with it.