Hi Tom!
 Great to hear from you again., Glad to hear you have been busy. I've been
preparing for a video shoot of a group that I'm in.. the local cable
company is in need of "public access" material, and the kicks band needs some 
booking material, so what the hey.. stone two birds with one kill. Other than 
that, have been mostly in getting set up to record some original material 
here that I've been wanting to get around to slowly getting an album of 
material together for possible release in the near future. My other kicks 
band may also get a video shoot in the near future, and a third shoot here at 
my studio may also get done. Lots of editing to do on that (will be using 
three VCRS and syncing to a Tascam Portastudio 4 track cassette) which will 
be flown into my Spectral workstation for editing, maybe a little sweetning 
on a couple more tracks and then mixed down to DAT as the master for the 
audio. Would be nice to just play the music, but also have to deal with power 
distribution for the lighting, co-program the drum machine, direct the band,
be audio engineer, and then co-producer of the video editing sessions. Too 
many hats to deal with at once, Trying to get the "shoot" to the point where 
I don't have to do much except music when the tape finally rolls, and then 
spend many hours in audio production and video editing afterwards before it 
gets to "air ready".
 Now, regarding what you wrote about:
 > A maximum db law finally has been enacted (hurray).  We still have
 > the flappers, but perhaps not at the overall levels I was hearing
 > before.
I recently wrote about the newly enacted local law here so won't repeat all 
of that. Pretty stiff fines though.. ought to get the cop's attention to help 
put money in a government's coffers and solve much of the problems. Those 
with the flapmobiles caused this all by themselves.
 > I am taking the MiniDisk and using the SP/DIFF outs into a Digital
 > Only card on a PC.  Then I bash the audio around with Sound Forge
 > and burn it to CD.  This setup works really well for me - BUT -
 > I need multi-tracking.  I am looking at the new ADAT and a Mackie
 > 24x8 board.  Not heavy hitting studio gear, but what think?
I have a copy of Sound Forge, but have only fiddled with it a little. It's 
not a legit copy for me to use, but I have looked it over and it should do 
much of the things needed as I can do on the S ectral workstation, just 
slower (I have a lot of DSP number crunching that helps speed things and with 
8 tracks of digital to lay to, you can do bounces through FX on the Sound 
Forge to get complicated sounding multi effects if you need to with a free 
track or two on a digital multitrack.
You just can't do much better than a Mackie as far as quality unless you pay
much more, so that much is good thinking on your end. The choice of digital 
recorder to use might be looked at a little more closely.
> I seem to remember that you have pretty extensive ADAT experience?
I don't use ADAT at this time, but have used them, and they are getting to be 
used a lot by the home/project/musician studios. My biggest beef with the 
ADAT is that there is no digital I/O only analog. Especially when using
computer software for individually doing tracks, when staying in the digital 
domain and not going through A/D/A conversions is important. In your case, 
I'd at least look for a solution using digital I/O or having it available to 
keep from going through conversions. Remember that ADAT format is also made 
by Fostex and who knows who else has the licensing. ADAT is going to be a 
musical conduit though, it seems, so that format might be the best bet. 
 > What about the Tascam Hi8?
 There are things I like about the Tascam format, and things I don't but a 
number of folk seem to think this format is better than ADAT. One thing has 
to do with writing and overwriting tracks on things like punch-ins and such.
 > SAW?
Well, the Sound Forge is a good software for processing audio in many ways
as long as you have time to wait for it and do one thing at a time, but it 
will do much of what you need FX wise while using a digital recorder. The SAW 
and some other low end plug and play workstation options may be very lacking
in multitrack modes, with bottlenecks in data to and from drives being a 
factor to look at very strongly. My Spectral system as an example has
seperate SCSI ports for each 8 tracks of audio.
A good option to consider is the Otari harddisk recording system which has 
analog I/O and switchable AES/EBU (AES3) digital I/O. Since hard drives are 
dropping in price so quickly, this is getting much more of a realistic option 
for the average person.
 >  I have $5 - 6000 to put into the recorder and board.  I KNOW you get
 > what you pay for, but I think I can achieve some pretty good results
 >with this setup.
 > (Session 8 would be cool, but I keep hearing that it does not
 > sound as good as some other alternatives).
  Check out the S ectral Prisma series of workstations. Much superior to the 
Session 8 in sound quality.
Yak soon, out of time here.
 Bonnie *:>
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