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   
   ---   
    * Origin:  (1:116/901)