Well it came round really fast this year, that is our 3rd Equippers Church Album recording which we did at the end of January. As this was our 3rd recording we are starting to get into a rhythm of doing them, so this time the technical side came together without a hitch and the recording weekend went well. We even got to try some new recording technology (read below) and generally streamlined the whole process.
Our primary recording was from a split from the stage to a 16 channel TAC desk then direct out to a Apogee AD-16X, the other 16 Channels went via a 16 channel custom pre to another Apogee AD-16X. This all then went into a Mac Pro via a Apogee Symphony card into Logic 9. Our primary backup recording was via the lightpipe outputs from the Apogee AD-16X’s to a Presonus Firestudio Lightpipe interface connected to a Macbook Pro via firewire then into Logic 9, this meant we were getting exactly the same input path for both recordings. However this did not protect us from a failure somewhere from the stage split to the computers so we also ran another computer (Mac Mini) connected into our new Dante digital audio network. This works by having 2 Dante cards in our Yamaha M7CL then a cat6 cable from each card is connected to a standard 1Gb Ethernet switch, the Mac mini is then connected to this network and has the Dante virtual sound card software installed which enables the Mac mini, in this case, to record 32 channels of audio from the direct outs of the M7CL into Logic 9, hence providing us a complete out of band recording setup.
On the night all the Mac’s went perfectly except for the Mac Pro which glitched for about 5 seconds and we had to restart it recording, but other than that all turned out as planned.
I have included in this post my planning diagrams for your viewing pleasure.
