The Future of Microsound?

[geggyboy]

And MTU only. My goodness me.. I aint been here for soooooooooooo long. Are we all still alive????

Yep still on MTU....sorry to be that old dino, but everyday, all day, mostly all night as well, MTU Krystal is still going. In fact I type this on the very same machine on which my editor is installed. Of course the computer is a 2 core duo yappiddy whippidy dingly dangly now with a zerabyte of ram.. but still MTU Krystal on board and a twin system in the video suite.
I talk with Jack Parnell quite a bit.. He is way up now in years, more than me even, but still using 2.7 on Win 98 but EVERYDAY threatened to move up. Maybe he did by now, but up to what??? Krystal cards are as rare as unicorn dung now.

You would be surprized what the so-called pros out there are doing. Digital up the ying yang.. The best converters.. the THD better than a vacuum... yet still MOST pro studios using the 'Analogue outputs' of their bog standard computers.. Yes sir/madam!! You would be shocked. Try going studio to studio like we do everyday using ISDN. Here we struggle to stay digital and the kit accepts it.. (Mayah buit in- and Audio TX - with 3rd party sound card), good Lord above.. we find sample rate mismatch 98% of the time with the other ends not having a clue what is going on.. 'BUT IT WORKS WITH EVERYONE ELSE - I'VE RECORDED 6 COMMERCIALS TODAY AND A DOC FOR HISTORY.. ALL FINE.. NOBODY COMPLAINED".... Of course not.. Because they are using analogue. (another reason we'd kill for wordclock on MTU).

Anyway: Got Two Pro Tools systems for the very same reason Rich got his - to be there in case.. Digi 001 and a Digi 003 . I HAVE NEVER EVER EVER USED THEM.you might even see some rough old pix if you go to my web site www.geghopkins.com (I will eventually take some better pix - but these are accurate as such - early 2009)
Got 48 tracks of Alesis HD24s..still - Yamaha DM2000 (like Geezer Jim)
Still got the old Akais 24 track DR16 + 8 in sync.. still work wonderfully.
Got Cubase. It came free with DM2000 Version 2 update.. but we already had it.
Got Audition which we use in the video ALL THE TIME.. But it is fed from the MTU. We record NOTHING directly to it.

Most of the time for music on the fly - I use the Yamaha AW4416 in 24 bit mode @ 48K.. Try beating it.. You cannot.. it is a lovely sound off that... But all digital not analogue in and out - and all cuts, edits and final.. transferred to MTU ..

Nothing touches MTU. If it goes another 5 years... then it will more than likely out live me and there is really NOTHING new out there... it has all been invented.

Anyway.. I came on here really to find out two things. I don't suppose Dave ever got to grips with wordclock for the Kyrstal although it supports it.. (onboard receptical socket) as far as I know the software doesnt... Maybe I am out of touch..

The other thing is.. I am still trying to get the Krystal to default as the Windows sound card, like I did before with the Rev J I think. I can't ever remember doing it with XP --But so many years gone by.. maybe we did.
G

[Rich LePage]

Nice to see Geg is still out there and still using the stuff too.
Also very nice to see these forums back up and running.

Yep, wordclock would be nice, not essential here for my use,
but nice to have.

Enjoyed talking with Dave a month or so ago, too - it had been
ages.

Lately, still using Medit (in fact using it right now) as a first pass
device (also to lay stuff like v/o down with usually) and then I usually move
WAV files made from 1st pass editing over to Audition and pile on the
plugs as needed. Often I use Ozone now, also quite often will go to the UA digital plugs which are very good. We have several of their DSP cards, the old and new ones both. A few of the
Waves plugs often seem to get used too, though less than a few years
ago - I tend to prefer the UA ones for many things and they run well
with Audition.


Also nice to catch up a bit with Jim Smith - it was right around the time
my original mentor Les Paul passed away and so particularly insightful.
I'd spent a lot of time with Les in his last several months, though much of
it was in hospitals, including his last birthday in June.

Medit continues to be a really solid tool for me and very reliable.
Usually I will mix down (digitally mostly) from a multi-track Audition environment to a MTU system too, rather than "render" in the box with
Audition. It's also very handy for some jobs to be able to put in track markers on the fly while doing that and then go back and align them correctly after everything is done. I still use it for making all CD masters - or at least the images the masters will be burned from. Then I take the cue files and WAV image file over to a Nero system (to support the newer burners) and make the masters using that, mostly with late-model Plextor IDE burners.

Golden Hawk - whose underlying code was used in MicroCD- seems to be totally gone now, they still have a website but are not reachable.

The P/Tools gathers dust here. I did hook up the 002 Rack module on a test machine to mess with using Audition, but I wound up liking a TC firewire interface better - lower latency and overall better sound. We have a MOTU one as well that sounds good but seems a bit more of a resource hog so it works better with the higher-end machines, dual or quad core etc etc.

I did upgrade the software to version 7 at one point, played with it for about an hour, confirmed I still didn't like it and put it away. As for comptability reason we originally bought it -- it just has not ever been an issue. Oh well.

The interface (other than MTU) that has been very reliable is (of all things) an old Aardvark Q10- with the only Win XP drivers they ever made for the thing. It's been very rock-solid on a Pent 4 3.2 gig system for a long time,
which runs Audition and usually several of the older UAD1 boards.

What's so curious about that -- is that the DSP chip on their PCI board is none other than the same one MTU used in Krystal. Likely the reason Aardvark suddenly went out of business was same thing Dave faced with Motorola!!

I only ever got Medit happy with Win XP on one machine - the other Medit systems here run on Win98 and WinME- might be ancient now, but they work very well for what they do. The other systems are all XP except one office machine which runs Vista- which for me has been rather quirky. No Win7 boxes yet... though I did set up a Ubuntu machine recently using old junk parts and a Pent 200 and was pretty amazed how well it runs for simple stuff using old - and today really slow- hardware. It has Audacity in it because they have a free version for Ubuntu/Linux. But I just use it for playing around, nothing serious.

Another editor I've been hearing some about over at www.audiomasters.com (which is a Cool Edit/Audition user group) is Reaper. But have not tried it - might when I have a little time though.

I don't record much directly into Audition either though seems to work fine when I do that. I'm just so used to MTU way of working that it works better for me -- besides sounding real good.

Hope all of us stay well and stay working- best regards to all - and thx MTU for putting back this forum. Back to some editing here...

Rich

[geezer]

Hey Geg, et al!

My understanding about getting Krystal to take wordclock is that this was one of the original problems noted about Motorola, etc., and that it just never will be able to do it.

HOWEVER, it is certainly easy to make Krystal sync to incoming digital via the AES port, and this is a perfectly good substitute. I am always doing this with my Alesis Masterlink, by the way, and it makes an enormous difference in the resultant playback sound.

My two MTU systems are still sitting on a shelf in the barn unused, though I took the CD burner out of one of them to install in my youngest son's newly purchased used AW4416, which does work amazingly well, as you suggest, Geg. I got him up and running and doing automated music mixes in a single day on the thing.

I have had occasion in the last year to do some critical listening and comparisons with newer stuff to my last couple of CDs mastered on MicroEditor with MicroCD from 24bit projects, and have refined what I think about that....have made comparisons with the old 16 bits-all-the-way-through stuff, too.

Although I still find the MicroCD dither-free bit reduction to retain most of the frequency response pallette of the original file, I also find it to have a bit of a "veiled" sound overlaid. When starting with 16bit files, this additionally veiling does not happen.......But I am still struggling with how to bring ANY 24 bit file to a CD without destroying it.

I am still using Wavelab with Waves plugins to achieve this most of the time, but still have to experiment heavily with each product to get it to sound the way I want.......A big time mastering engineer that has been mastering some major label albums for a good friend of mine seems to achieve this simply by doing all processing in the analogue domain, and having superior converters on either end of the process.

The importance of conversion has really been hammered into me over the last couple of years. Luckily, I have found what I consider to be the ultimate, perfect D to A converter, and now have that in my monitoring chain so that I feel I always know what I am hearing while working on anything......This is the converter built in to the Dangerous Music "The Monitor" monitoring/switching unit. It syncs instantly to anything you switch it to, so you can be working with multiple sources at different sampling rates that are not clocked together and make instant A-B comparisons.

This has been a godsend. Before having it, I was going through enormous contortions making sure the monitoring section in my DM2000 was clocking correctly to whatever I was listening to.......And the accuracy of the Dangerous converters is vastly superior to anything else I have heard. The result is that when I listen to my old mixes, the stuff which was always good still sounds just fine, but the stuff that had some problems that I could not quite fix now sounds TERRIBLE and I now know exactly what I should have done........Something about the phase accuracy across the whole spectrum.

Unfortunately, Dangerous is not making A to D converters, so that is a whole other can of worms I am still thinking about......but at least now I can trust what I am hearing all the time.

I am still using Wavelab as my primary editor/mastering environment, but I am about to enter the DAW multitrack world a little more forcefully than I had ever intended. This will mostly enhance some long distance production and music making that I have started in on......and will probably force me, kicking and screaming, into the Pro Tools HD world.

I am, just now, finishing up the album that was tracked at NPR 3 years ago on PT HD, and I have also been doing some long distance consulting with a friend for his major label mixing on his brand new PT HD system using a Dangerous 2 Bus for external analogue summing.......In both instances, I have to say that there is just something about the PT HD files that I do not like. It is hard to define....some kind of low level dithering cloud or something, but it is there. I have not had the opportunity to really dive into the use or setup of a PT HD system, so I don't know if I can find ways to use it that avoid this. I do know that every time a file makes a trip through the system, dithering is added, so maybe that is what is going on.....but that should not have affected the NPR files.....who knows.

I am still very, very happy with my DM2000. I bought an 02R96 for my live work, and have found that it sounds almost identical to the DM2k as long as you keep it in the digital domain.......The converters in the monitor section sound awful compared to those in the DM2k, however, which is how this whole quest for converters started with me......I actually ended up dropping money on the other Dangerous switching/monitoring box (Monitor ST with DAC ST) so that I could have the same kind of confidence in what I was hearing when I was out on gigs. Big money, but big relief, too.

I still have 7 DA78s and 2 MX2424s, but I have been using the HD24s almost exclusively for all my live work. Both of my machines have the XR converter upgrade, and I have come to think that they actually sound quite good. I used them in tandem to record a festival in NY last summer, and they worked flawlessly in that environment.....Although it seems as if Alesis is getting ready to discontinue them (the supply of EC-2 converter upgrades is drying up completely), they are simple enough, and there is enough support coming out of the forum, that I think they will stay useful for quite a while. One guy on the forum is making caddies that take SATA drives, and another writes fabulous software that allows file transfers, repairs damaged files, etc.

The only other choice out there seems to be the X48, which has some other nice features, but a few drawbacks, as well........Even though it is priced very fairly, I can't justify the expenditure for it at the moment...not enough work.

Anyway, I am just sort of dawdling along. Just got the last kid out of the house, and my oldest just made me a grandfather, so this generally takes the front seat and the audio stuff sits back a bit.

I have been trying to branch out a bit more into video editing.....I produced a Blu Ray presentation for my brother at NAMM in January, and I am finding all the hi def stuff pretty exciting.

I may try to crank up one of my MTU rigs to salvage some files from an old album.....If so, you guys are sure to hear from me, because I can't remember anything about how to use them.....it has just been too long.

....good hearing from everyone. Don't hesitate to contact me directly:

mudsmith@earthlink.net 304-261-9426

[geezer]

.....Just wanted to add that my purchase of the Lynx AES 16 card as my primary desktop interface for various software packages a couple of years back made a HUGE difference in my ability to get quality sounds in and out of the computer. The thing is just rock solid. Zero jitter bit stream.

I also just upgraded what I am using with my laptop to the newer RME Multiface and mobile card, and that sounds a lot better than the old version, too, but was pretty expensive.

I am sure there are new, less expensive options that I have not used.

[Rich LePage]

Wow, cool to hear from Jim again here too!

The summing thing is definitely a road I plan to investigate.

And great to hear about the Dangerous D/A and monitoring and the Lynx- they are roads I think I too will travel before much longer - work and funds permitting!

The dithering thing is interesting too. I want to play around with more 24 bit stuff and see if I hear what Jim noted, I don't hear it (as he noted) on 16 bit projects.

All best to you guys!

Rich

[Gary Boggess]

Hey all,

Got the notice to check in here. I'm on my way to dinner with the girlfriend soon, but here's a short contribution:

I'm still using my Microsound for everything I do... which hasn't been too much this last year due to the economy here in Tampa. But, last July, a film I did audio post for got some attention. I did all of the sound design, dialog editing, Foley (cloth, walking, props etc.), music editing, BG's, and the final mix on the Microsound. The feature film, "Loren Cass", opened in New York City and got rave reviews by Variety, MOMA, the Village Voice and other reviewers. What was a shocker was that the New York Times loved it too... and went so far as to mention the audio work... which is rare for reviewers to do for an opening film:

The New York Times writes about our audio post work for feature film, "Loren Cass": "Equal credit for the movie’s power and poetry goes to Gary Boggess for his extraordinary sound work, a dense, enveloping mix of drones, disruptions and howls..." - 7/24/09

LINK to the review:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/07/24...s/24loren.html

So, I see some of us STILL can't find a reason to abandon our MTU's... I know I can't. MicroEditor does exactly what I want it to do... EDIT, ASSEMBLE and MIX without getting in my way. It's still the BEST audio editing device I've ever seen... and I've spent time with protoys the last two years. I was on the advisory board and a frequent lecturer on music and film sound production at the Tampa International Academy of Design and Technology. I've sat in during sessions in their protoys studio. And I had to HUSH my thoughts often. Most of the time as I watched them (protoys certified instructors) work... I was thinking: "HOLY CRAP!!! I COULD HAVE DONE THAT OPERATION (or EDIT) IN SECONDS (w/MTU) AND THEY'RE STILL TRYING TO MAKE IT WORK!!!!"

So... long live the Microsound. I own FOUR computers with Krystal cards each. I have ONE 4in/4out external balanced I/O module, and ONE 2in/2out balanced I/O module, one extra and TWO OTHERS full systems, plus FOUR small 2- I/O boxes!!! I have most of this in storage out of paranoia of my main system failing. At age 57, I (or someone) will be able to work on MicroSound until long after the 2nd Coming!. ;P

btw, not taking swine flu vaccine... am convinced its all bio-weapons... and depopulation agenda. ;(

[geggyboy]

We are still at it! Not only that..my username geggyboy and the password still works. Then suddenly notification. Just can't believe it..
Well hello there.. Hope you are all fine. (Jimbo and I talk techy quite a bit but not for a while now.. Time i did maybe and teased him a bit about Obama)

I gave a mate of mine a Krystal a couple of years back as he left Bahrain for home in San Antonio. He called me today as he has 'JUST" started to use it. He was a bit miffed; "The *&*^ MTU forum is *&^& nothing working anymore.. How do I ...... dah dah dah" etc..
I can help him out somewhat, but with XP it should just start working if he gets his connections right.

Anyway, Low and B. it is here..proof, we are speaking on it now... But whether there is anything to be gained from it technically now - is a bit abstract. We've all said it all! Dave made his decisions.. Amen!

Reaper! Tried that once.. An Ozzie guy who sold me a Krystal on here was using it and told me it was good, so we downloaded. Yeah..not impressed so forget that one.. I like the TV series though.

Rich u use the Fireworks? I like that kit. I like TC or did.. All my TC kit failed at the same time last month. The power supplies sort of faded out all within a few days of each other. Same fault... had to wait half and hour for them to come on. Two Gold Channels and Two Finalizers. I got power supplies sent out, but no good.. Finalizer lost its boot.... The Gold Channels make the most horrendous electrical noise now and I don't know what it is. For a year or two now i have noticed the background noise, like ambience and a bit of hum, which I always thought was just that....no amount of digging holes and running copper in the garden adn watering every day - seemed to make a difference. Turns out it was the Gold Channel.. Not too kosher that considering what the beast is supposed to be for. TC got fed up with me asking how to fix it.. I can if I have the diagrams.. Well sometimes..

I note on a very old post of mine about using the Krystal as the default Windows player.... there is a sentence added by Dave or Brian.. Says: NO LONGER SUPPORTED I never knew that it ever was.

WC..if you read the 2.7 manual it mentioned about the Word Clock plug on the top of the board... and ''''future software upgrades will include support''' Hmmmm! But yeah.. I'm not sure what you mean by the Krystal will clock to incoming AES/EBU. I thought it did that as default.. I don't know how to set the Krystal clock.. Internal or input or output...etc.. Is there a method??
(I only use Krystal on digital.. AES IN/OUT with a monitor to the 02R 2Track Digital in off the SPDIF output at the same time. )

I have just had a big run in with the guy that sells AUDIO TX and the Marion MARC 2 card. The card is ok, but i find the analogue outs are terrible but he says 10,000 of his customers are using it and ALL analogue to a mixer and no complaints. I can hear others using it down the line when I am connected ISDN.. I hate PCI sound cards... but with the ISDN stuff, sometimes you have to use them as the USB or Firewires time out the needed synchronous elements when using software ISDN codecs. In other words.. you go out of sync/frame/lock

Got the TC KONNECT 32.. firewire.. Cannot get it to work or stable enough and that is on a SHUTTLE X. Anyone else used it?

Oh I know what I wanted to say Jimbo... Boot Krystal.. as I said I am monitoring off the SPDIF to the 2 trk in dig of the 02R.. (AES goes to wherever need for recording) Sometimes I have to hit the monitor switch on the mixer twice - switch out and switch in again - to lock the Krystal and stop it ESSING!! I always thought it was the mixer, but I think it is the Krystal. But I posted about that years and years ago (before I had an 02R).

We got Pig flu in the house here.. (confirmed) so off to die for a while.. Later guys - Great to hear from you.. G ..

[Rich LePage]

Hi again,
No not Fireworx - We have a Konnekt 24 D which I have been liking. Originally I hated it, but the newer drivers made things better and much lower latency. It only has 4 analog outs, but I mostly don't use them anyway - stuff goes out SPDIF - there's no AES on it. In that setup, I monitor off whatever is end of the chain, which is often a 2nd MTU system the stuff is being mixed to.

You can also use it as a standalone set of preamps and/or mixer, which I tried once or twice but mostly don't use. I don't care for the "onboard DSP plugs" (Fabrik C compressor, an EQ and a Fabrik R reverb) but it seems to work well as an interface with a not-high-horsepower Pentium 4 single core machine. I think they make a cheaper one without the DSP as well. Konnekt 8 I think.

With Audition, I use a Frontier Alphatrack sometimes, also once in a while a cheap Behringer controller box. They can be handy for some things.

Have not had a problem with the TC Firewire's power supply (a wart) which I do use rather than bus powering the thing. It seems to have plenty and is likely over-spec'd. TC says the box will run on a range of voltages and current anyhow.

I had that recently with a Linksys router a friend found in a dumpster and gave me. No power supply - so looked it up and found a 12volt wart that made it very happy. Other then reprogramming it and adding new firmware, it was perfectly fine and now runs a few machines as a little sub-network -- sort of a router behind the main router.

Interesting your observations though re TC. I HAVE had some unexplainable power glitches sometimes with their Finalizer and also another unit we have called a DB Max. I don't use them so much anymore, but in past for no reason they would crackle and do strange things and even shut off. Usually shutdown for a half hour and re-power and all was well -- maybe bad caps I thought. But the power on/off on those on the front doesn't really power it on/off- the switch on back does. My problems were the front panel power switch - which I think just powers on the mainboard while the other one switches the actual power supply.

I have pretty clean power running them, so I doubt it was that.

I sometimes have similar problem with a digital Aphex Compellor, where for no reason 1 side only (left) of the digital signal suddenly drops way down in level. After a minute or so it might go back and might not. The fix always seems to be power the thing off and then on again - a delay while it locks to the incoming signal and then it's fine. Never figured out why- and it would happen with nearly ANY incoming digital signal. It does not occur with analog input signal at all.

FLU-- gosh, sounds awful. Hope that resolves quickly and w/o problems for you.

I've heard others have the Gold Channel problem you mention- in fact I heard it do that during a demo in a store when it first came out. I concluded it was not for me-seemed a little pricey as well. I have a couple Millennia units I use a lot and a few others. John La Grou of Millennia was an MTU user at one time, met him once at an AES show - he used it to record classical music in San Francisco for a long time.


All for today - hope all goes well on that flu front especially. Nasty stuff. I was in NYC yesterday and one v/o actor brought his kid. Said he'd had a fever the day before - no flu -- but the school would not allow his kid in after having had fever the day before as a precaution. First I'd heard that.


Rich

[geezer]

....Although I no longer have any memories of which Medit software versions were which, I do remember going through some official release statements I found a while ago that were from around maybe '97 or so when Dave still thought he would continue development. There were all kinds of future promises about multitrack, etc., but they all turned out to be vapor.

I know Dave WANTED to include wordclock input, and had been told he could implement it with the Motorola chip....but I also know that he later realized that some significant Motorola promises were false, and I specifically remember him telling me that this was one of the promises that went up in smoke.

As far as syncing to the AES port, or SPDIF port for that matter, I simply meant that the card will do that anyway when you specify that port as the input port, as long as the input signal is coming from whatever device you want to lock wordclock to. This method of deriving wordclock works just fine, really, and I used it as a means of maintaining sync for a long time on video projects after the implementation of Krystal. This was important to figure out because the initial, very high quality chase ability of the rack mounted analogue I/O was undone the minute you started coming in digital only with Krystal......but it still worked in the same way as all the modern, native computer systems. In other words, as long as Medit lined up with incomimg SMPTE initially, then ran on the right wordclock derived from the incomimg digital signal, it will stay in sync forever.

The original rackmount I/O would actually varispeed the analogue output (by varying the clock) from MTU to match up with incoming SMPTE, but the Krystal card could not do this. The original system would really "chase", which was the initial reason I bought the system.

.......The most important rule about digital is this: Any digital input must sync exactly with the wordclock of the source, or to another wordclock source that is exactly in time with the digital audio source. Before the proliferation of wordclock ports, the only way we had to do this was syncing to the input source.....and many times that is still the only way. I mentioned AES because it is slightly more solid in this way, but SPDIF works okay, too.

When I am clocking my Alesis Masterlink for playback to its AES input, I am actually using an AES output of my master wordclock generator usually......but I would obviously be syncing to the input stream if I was recording on it, or to something else if it had to be in sync to something else....

[geggyboy]

Lucid GENx 192

[admin]

Originally Posted by geezer

The original rackmount I/O would actually varispeed the analogue output (by varying the clock) from MTU to match up with incoming SMPTE, but the Krystal card could not do this. The original system would really "chase", which was the initial reason I bought the system.

Well almost... The MicroSync card did the sync-lock resolving to TimeCode, and it could lock to a +/-50% varispeeding TC... best that I found of any product that sync-locked.

ALL our I/O Modules could sync-lock resolve to TC, not just the Rack Mount. In fact, if you look inside the Rack, you'll see the stack of cards (Clock Board on the bottom) that also would slide into the smaller "blue box" case. Same cards, different cables for the Rack to go to XLRs.

Congratulations Gary! It does my heart good to hear of Microsounds still running. We designed them like a Sherman Tank to last forever.

If Mototola hadn't lied to us or we had used a different AES/SPDIF digital chip, we'd still be shipping Krystals and Medit. Took the wind out of our sails forever. Alas, Microsound was our Crown Jewel development of my now 41 years doing developments. I'm glad some of you are still making profits with your investment!