by mattseymour » Sun Jul 01, 2012 2:53 am
SAC is a fully featured digital mix engine. You get EQ, gate and compressor on every channel and you can insert VSTs or saw studio plugins on channels or main outs or groups as you require. For most people this would cover anything you might previously have done with external processing. It's unlikely you will need any however you can use it if you like.
What you need for a basic system is a host computer and a quality audio interface with sufficient i/o for your requirements. I would avoid trying to use a laptop for sac. Firewire or USB audio interfaces can work, but you need to get the right one, the right laptop and probably run at slightly higher latency. Using a desktop board, you can build your own rackmount setup as I've done, is a much better way forward for reliability. My tried and tested system uses a Clarkdale i3 CPU on an MSI mainboard, I'm just building a new host for our church using a sandybridge i3 on a gigabyte board - seems ok so far. Optimising the computer is important. It needs to be doing nothing other than audio. Don't have it connected to the internet and make sure you follow Bob's advice for setting up windows. Turn off every service you don't need and you should end up with a good reliable system.
You've listed the motu 2408, that's what I use, and many others here, it's a good option as it gives you 24 channels of i/o, 8 of which can be analogue. So two 2408s will allow you to connect 32 channels of adat, and have another 16 channels of line level analogue as well, which is handy. The motu system uses a single PCI or PCIe card that can support up to four interfaces. You can mix and match the interfaces too, so if you needed a load of analogue io, you could add the 24io in the future. They're sold with and without the PCI card, so you need to make sure you get at least one card (called the 424) to connect the 2408s to your computer.
The Octopre MkII Dynamic offers 8 inputs, converted to adat and 8 outputs as well. So each of these units gives your analogue i/o from adat.
You've listed the saffire pro. Can't understand why you would want these. My experience of Focusrite's audio interfaces is they're hopeless for low latency use. Besides, you've got the Motu for your audio interface.
If you want to link from stage to foh using ethernet you've got two basic choices. You could build a mixrack - host computer and all audio i/o on the stage and then a cat5 cable to foh where you have a second PC running SAC remote. This is a good, cheap solution if you don't need to put audio in from foh. If you do... you could run a couple of audio cables, or a few folk run line level through baluns down a piece of cat5 which can work well.
Your other option is to use one of the adat extenders. I've got on of the apps units which converts up to four adat interfaces (one direction only) and carries it up to 100m over cat5. You would need the 64 channel version probably, which uses two cat5 runs. With this solution you can put the host at foh, you get 16 channels analogue i/o on your Motus for cd/video audio/etc playback and all your mic pres live on the stage where you'd have 32 inputs and 32 outputs as well if you wanted.
There are other alternatives to the appsys.ch units, but what I like about these is their simplicity. Particularly for an install they're a good option. They don't use ethernet, but I wouldn't want to try and run the audio through a building's network infrastructure anyway, much better to use dedicated cabling.
With the Motus you can use any DAW for recording. I use Reaper on the host computer, no problems. I connect an external USB HD for recording.
All make sense?