The older Alesis USB mixers just do stereo outs, the behringer ones all only do stereo I think. So you will probably have to upgrade your PC with a firewire card, and get the firewire version. Although I bought my firewire mixer two years ago now.. so maybe things have moved on.. I've got a phonic helix board, it's been great both as a mixer for rehearsing and small gigs and as a recording interface. These are on ebay sometimes for under £300. I went for a rode NT1 as a condenser and I like it alot, i also have some naiant really cheap mic's that i use as overheads and they're easily worth the money (google naiant studios). The pair were less than £50 even with postage from the US.

Thanks. I actually have no problem upgrading to FireWire, it's just that the Alesis FireWire board they have is only an 8-channel model, whereas the USB one was a 16. Oh well, I'll have to break into the realm of Internet buying then.

phildodd wrote:I'd say this is what you want; a Firewire or USB interface. As far as I understand it, Firewire is better than USB, but I don't know enough about computers to tell you why.

My first post; salut. Hopefully helpful:

Firewire is "better" in that the protocol is more efficient: the overhead of transferring data is lower than with USB, such that 400Mbps Firewire is (can be) faster than 480Mbps USB 2.0, though in reality for transferring 16 tracks of 96KHz/24-bit, either will be more than enough, and USB tends to be more ubiquitous nowadays.

The Alysis USB interface uses a very cool TC Electronics chip that allows for very smooth tranfer via USB. Previous to this chip and USB2 the USB protocal was suitable only for two tracks in USB1.

Firewire has been the king of protocals in as much as the audio transfer is good and the ability to chain your Firewire drive and interface on a single chain. As well as described before the ability to send multible datastreams through the firewire made it ideal for audio.

16 tracks may be the max at this point for USB2 although that should be more than enough for most home studios.

I am sure that there is a lot of development going on for USB now as it seems to be a more standard (cheaper) input to a lot of PCs and I think that most of the market for interfaces are more hobbiest types (like myself). Firewire plugs has always been in higher end computers but was seldom standard in most PCs.

Big John wrote:16 tracks may be the max at this point for USB2 although that should be more than enough for most home studios.

Well, at 96Khz/24-bit, each track carries 24 * 96,000 = 2.304 Mbits of data, so USB2 should be able to carry 480Mbs / 2.304Mbit = 208.33 tracks of audio per second. Even factoring in the overhead of the protocol (significantly higher than for FW), that's more tracks than you'll need over a single USB bus.

You are correctly defineing the mathmatical capasity of USB2. Howeaver as I understand it the audio needs to be "threaded" to pipe through USB2 and the TC Electronics chips run at max 16 tracks. Or at least the ones last year did. The TC Electronics chip is the standard USB2 audio chip and only came avalable last year. The treading process as I understand it uses more bandwidth to maintain accurate streaming of multible chanels of audio than is required in Firewire which is speced to handle multible data chanels this ineffeciency in the technique to thread multible audio streams not the size of the audio itself is the USB issue. Apparently the TC Electronics chip is pretty elegant to get USB to do this against the nature of its one data line nature.

I am sure if they have more than one chip or multible interfaces connected by digital audio plugs USB2 could carry more tracks as you state. Although I have not seen a interface yet with that capasity (although I admit to not being all knowing on the latestest developments)

Interesting; I couldn't find any references to this "threading" idea though. Do you have a link? I'd be interested to learn more.

While we're sort of on the subject, are there any ways* to record live multitrack sound WITHOUT using FireWire/newer USB boards or using multiple soundcards? There's a SoundCraft board at the same store, which is cheaper and has more inputs, but is just a standard mixer. So I'm just wondering.

*that are within the means of the average home producer working within the digital realm

http://prosoundnewseurope.com/pdf/psne_ ... P62_TF.pdf

This is a good article Firewire vs USB. The "threading" consept is to create jitter free multi chanel transfer through asyncronos USB2 data pipes as well as lower latency and allow for on the fly error correction.

It was described in some of the early Dice II documnetation. Although Dice II seems to be mostly a Firewire product now but is the underlying engine on a lot of interfaces.

Google Dice II TC electonics for the .pdf white paper.

kazoozak wrote:Audacity is fine for bare-bones stuff, but it also craps out on you from time to time and there's currently no recovery function.

I am running the 1.3.4 beta, and at least by this version, that is no longer true. It now has a easy to use and understand recovery system (two clicks) that pretty quickly gets everything back.