Eqpt. selection, part 2: Powering everything

It's quite clear that the very ancient churches and other venues that the choir will be performing in may or may not have power outlets, and even if they do, I'd prefer not to shell out for a 240v power strip and drag an extension cord around. Thus it has to be battery power. 

Since everything runs on DC power once you get down to it, a single high-capacity DC battery seems to be the best choice. Since I settled on a computer-based system in an earlier post, I decided to simply supplement the Macbook's battery with a high capacity external laptop battery, and let it do the power distribution through USB and Firewire to the external hard drive and the audio interface. 

I bought a 130watt-hour external Lithium battery from Battery Geek (link), which in my testing lasts solidly through two sessions of mobile recording between charges, running the computer at full brightness with Logic open, recording to the USB hard drive from the Inspire with phantom power on for my two Studio Projects C4 mics that go in my backpack. 

Wait, what backpack? Oh right! How am I going to carry all this stuff with me onto the airplane and around Italy? Maybe next time...

Update on Mackie and the Inspire!

Unfortunately I can't report that things with Mackie and the Satellite have been going very well... the person who was supposed to analyze the audio samples I sent them never got back to me!

However let me say that the Inspire has been an excellent and worthy companion. While the preamps are a bit less dynamically spacious than those on the Satellite, it wins in the categories of safety and convenience. 

I've been using it for my last few mobile gigs, and the fact that everything is entirely software controlled is incredibly handy - Now I don't have to take my hands off the laptop to adjust levels, and it also means I can place the interface in a place that's convenient for cable management, rather than having to compromise between clean cable routing and knob accessibility. Doing everything in software is really a godsend and I know I'll miss it when I'm back in the studio working with the Firepod.

The built in analog-limiters are also lifesavers. Usually if a huge discrepancy between someone's "practice take" and the real one causes them to clip because I set the level too high, I have them stop and start over. While it's probably a bad idea to be bouncing off your limiter constantly, I have to say it saves a lot of time not redoing things if you happen to go over here or there. In live work it's kind of unpredictable what might change between the sound check and the performance so it's good insurance.

So even if the Satellite issues are addressed, I think I'm taking the Inspire to Italy...

Not to worry, the post I promised on how I am planning to power the rig is coming soon.

Onyx problems and an alternative audio interface

I'm now working with a Level 2 support tech at Mackie to get my problems with the Onyx Satellite sorted out, which is great because I really like the idea of it -- it's the perfect audio interface for me to take along to college in the fall.

However, for redundancy and also for the sake of trying new and different things, I went ahead and ordered a PreSonus Inspire 1394. Why did I choose it?

Well, first of all I've had a wonderful experience with PreSonus' midrange FireWire recording interface, the Firepod (since renamed FP10). It also has two features that I really like:

-Everything is software controlled, there are no knobs and buttons on the device. Not only does this make me less nervous about throwing it in a backpack and kicking it around, it also allows the software to store and recall different configurations on command. Also, since I'm recording in stereo with a matched pair of mics, it makes it trivial to ensure that I have both preamps at the exact same level, since it displays the precise amount of gain, whereas with knobs it takes a magnifying glass and some "feeling" to match them up.

-An analog clip limiter for both preamps. This is important to me because I am always torn when setting levels between my desire to maintain the dynamic range of the performance, and my knowledge that the recordings I make in Italy will end up in the iTunes libraries of the teenage performers, next to Soulja Boy et al. I've often tried to recover from digital clipping with a limiter plugin, with varying degrees of success. Analog clipping sounds a whole lot better than digital clipping so I'm really excited to have a hardware limiter in the signal chain BEFORE the A/D conversion.

Coming soon, maybe today, the promised Equipment selection part 2 post, where I'll discuss how I chose to power this setup.

Spoke too soon, part 2

Mackie support suggests jacking up the latency and then slowly dialing it back until it reaches tolerable levels. It could be that the latency setting I was using before I got the Satellite was fine for the Firepod, but too fast for this smaller, bus-powered interface. Will report on how that goes later.

Erp! Spoke too soon.

I didn't want to mention this about the wonderful Onyx Satellite interface but I'm actually on my third one... Mackie has promptly and courteously replaced the last two, but today during a recording gig I found that this one too had the same problem. It makes a crackling/artifacting noise regardless of the level of the incoming audio. I've captured an isolated sample of the crackling sound and plan to call Mackie again tomorrow to discuss this with them.

I'm actually hoping to get a full refund and switch to the smaller (albeit less flexible) Presonus Inspire, because of the great experience I've had with the Firepod.