Hello!
How can you figure out if the Dolby 422 includes the Dolby s module? The
reseller doesn't know if the unit he has for sale includes it or not. Is
there a way to do it?
Erik Dix
Notre Dame Archives
On 7/18/2013 1:50 PM, Richard L. Hess wrote:
> Hi, Andy and Carl,
>
> This became such a tome, I snipped all the quotes. I'm responding to
> Andy's original request and Carl's comments. I think Carl inverted the
> RME UCX and UFX. The UFX is the bigger unit and has the direct-record
> capability. The UCX is a half-rack unit. I do not think it has the USB
> record capability. The UCX only has four line inputs on the rear, but
> you can convince the front panel mic and instrument inputs to also be
> line inputs. The UFX has 8 line inputs on the rear plus four
> mic/instrument inputs on the front (but those are NOT balanced line in
> any mode other than padding down into the mics).
>
> The mic preamps in the UFX are better than those in my Sound Devices
> 722...not by much but they do sound superior to the 722 on good
> classical music with my DPA 4006TL matched pair.
>
> I use a USB "stick" adapter to SD cards and can record a bunch of
> channels on Class 6 SD cards though with prices falling, I'd go for
> Class 10 now...and have been since getting a Nikon D7100.
>
> (I tested a CF to SD adapter in Nikon D200 but have yet to test it in
> the SD722.
>
> I have not found any USB memory sticks that did not cause errors on
> recording while they thought about which block to put the next data in
> which was what prompted my use of the SD adapter. I carry two adapters
> and four 32 GB cards.
>
> I did find the RME recording software (part of DigiCheck) to be totally
> reliable via USB on my new Dell laptop. I use the FireWire connection on
> my desktop (except for firmware upgrades) as my CPU meter shows less CPU
> overhead if the FireFace UFX is on the FW port as opposed to the USB
> port. Works fine with FW400 and USB2.0.
>
> As to computers, I started upgrading to Windows 7 quite by accident. In
> 2010 during our long East Coast trip, my 2004 Dell laptop's hard drive
> crashed in Gros Morne Newfoundland. We went to a Wal Mart in Grand-Falls
> Windsor and there were not too many options. I bought a Win7 (I had
> avoided Vista completely) dual-core laptop that garnered a 3 x PASSMARK
> benchmark rating over the Pentium 4 3GHz processors I had been using.
> While it was interesting it was not enough to make a move. BUT, I was
> getting to like many of the features and stability of Win7. XP was the
> best I had experienced to date, but 7 just seemed to work better.
>
> In 2011, I started researching upgrade paths for the audio system as I
> had grown to like W7 and felt that for running my business I should not
> be relying on 2003-2004 workstations much longer.
>
> I'm glad I looked as my two RME Multiface II units had mated PCI cards
> and RME wanted about $350 each for PCIe cards that fit the slots that
> were proliferating in most modern computers. The concept made sense, but
> I found I could buy a Dell Vostro quadcore tower for less than the two
> RME PCIe cards. This tower just happened to have two PCI slots available.
>
> At the time, my oral history work was increasing and the post-processing
> was taking a good deal of time, so I thought why not split ingest and
> editing. I had been running two 3 GHz P4 machines in the studio, but all
> the audio work was done on one. The P4s have a rough Passmark score of
> 500. The ingest Vostro was running around 4000
>
> I purchased a second Dell tower--this time a Dell XPS Studio with a
> quadcore hyperthreading Core i7 930 processor--that was the hot machine
> in 2011. Its Passmark score was about 6000.
>
> The ingest machine tops out at 4 GB of RAM and I currently have 12 GB in
> the edit machine.
>
> Upgrading most things to 64 bits seems to also improve stability and
> throughput.
>
> I run W7 Pro on the towers which enables two things: Using Windows
> backup over the network and hosting remote desktop. I use W7 Home
> Premium on the laptops and actually am moving to Acronis TrueImage to do
> system backups (to protect against hard drive failure). I have well
> documented the data backup strategies that I have been using.
>
> Samplitude has kept up well with the 64 bit Win7 environment and its
> stability has improved as well. Algorithmix Noise Free Pro requires me
> to use the 32 bit version of Samplitude, but the few other third-party
> plugins I've used are working well in Samplitude's 32 bit bridge mode.
>
> For cleaning, I've moved mostly to iZotope RXII Advanced and generally
> work in its environment, using Samplitude for ingest, editing, and output.
>
> The Fireface UFX is the sound card on the i7 930 machine and I patch
> some outputs of the Multifaces to the Fireface (analog patch) so that I
> can monitor ingest, but the sample rates can be un-related. For example,
> I could be ingesting at 48 ks/s while editing at 96 ks/s. I can mix in
> the ingest to the monitor without corrupting what I'm doing...to keep an
> ear on it.
>
> Oddly, in 2012, I bought an i5-2400 tower and it also has a 6000
> Passmark processor benchmark. The march of Progress! I use that for
> email and photo ingest.
>
> I continue to purchase Dells and all the W7 machines I've purchased
> other than the HP in Newfoundland are Dells.
>
> My current machine population:
> Mary Beth i3 W7 Dell laptop
> Michael i3 W7 Dell laptop and HP (Newfoundland) laptop as backup
> Robert i7 W7 Dell laptop and high-end Dell Netbook (same
> Passmark score as a 3 GHz P4-500).
> Me i5 Dell laptop and the three Dell towers.
> 2003 2.4 GHz P4 XP machine for running the CD thermal printer
> in the studio (Did not migrate to W7-64 bit)
> 2004 3 GHz P4 XP machine for extra CD burning (also has
> s second printer on Trolley and secondary DAT ingest
> with MOTU 828 MK II
>
> So, that's what I did. Oh, I use Microsoft Security Essentials and am
> behind two SPI hardware firewalls--one in my DSL modem and a stand-alone
> Netgear.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
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