Hello Marc, and others who've joined us.



 RW> This, and some armored cat5 that will tolerate being run
 RW> outdoors and I'm in business.  TWo of these and the
 RW> requisite number of ada8000 boxes and I'm playing with quite enough
 RW> channels.  I've then only got comm on regular copper. I could sure
 RW> like that. 

ML> To further this discussion, Richard, there are quite a goodly number
ML> of manufacturers of digital snakes.  There are a wide variety of
ML> input and output options and a wide variety of protocols/formats of
ML> digital outputs.  But in my present position as a commercial audio
ML> service technician and not actively engaged in SR, I'd have to do
ML> some more intensive research on the various brands to see what's
ML> offered.  The quote that I put in above was from the Behringer
ML> site... But there have been some quality questions about their gear
ML> (aside from the numerous accusations of alleged patent infringements
ML> by several manufacturers.)

Right, which I could understand, but that case was settled.
There are some applications where Behringer is a good choice for the job,
folks who do rentals, etc.  Their little mic
pre/digital converter boxes are good bang per buck, etc.

ML> I'm going to pose the question again for the folks that have just
ML> been linked to the mailing list side: Options and opinions on both
ML> stand-alone and purpose-built digital snakes for SR or recording. 
ML> What's what on the market? What's your experience with quality
ML> and/or limitations?

This is one of those decisions i want to make once, and have a system that's
going to perform for a period of years,
without having to rethink it in 5 years.  I've played "early adopter" a couple
times in this business and found my
upgrade path was a trip to the gear orphanage, so I guess in my old age I'm
quite cautious.  I just about did that one
with the Mackie hard disk recorders, then went with the
Alesis hd-24.  THe only thing that's saving the Alesis
recorders is the user community right now, though Alesis is
starting to recognize that there's really a user base out
there with those recorders.  You'll note that a disk caddy
which handles sata drives was first developed by a member of that user
community and marketed over two years before
Alesis themselves came out with a sata caddy.  Something as
important as snakes isn't something I want to make a bad
decision with.

Regards,
           Richard
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