Standalone Digital Recorders

[virtua]

I usually use my PC as the hub of my studio, but I am in the market for a standalone DAW.

I'm comparing them with a laptop set up.

I haven't looked at DAWs for ages. Any personal recommendations or ideas? ty

[Rudi]

I cant help, but I am interested in these too. Lets hope someone will enlighten us.

[john]

Hey

Depends greatly what sort of features you want and your budget.

I have an old Roland VS880 VXpanded 8 track didgital recorder. Does the job nicely and you shouldn't need to fork out too much. The bigger brother 1680 has lots of nice features and a larger screen and if you can afford it definately worth the extra.

I'll happily take a look at the new ones on the market if you can give an idea of budget.

If you are the market for second hand why not post in our gear classified boards?

Cheers

John

[Rudi]

Thanks John. I wonder how these would compare with the upper range of BOSS BR range?

[JimL]

I've got a Korg D3200 (32 track, no pairs) which is pretty decent but it has no effects send/return - but I use effects pedals anyway. You can only add one of the internal effects to a channel and I've found it impossible to add 2 to 2 different tracks, theres some way to do it but as i play/record everything myself, i've only tried it once as an experiment with 2 vocal tracks recorded at the same time, so I gave up trying. Other than that, there was a brief learning curve at first and now it's a piece of cake. A CD burner's built in, I can bounce but don't need to w/32 tracks. Ignore the limited drum sounds in it and buy a real drum machine.

It has USB out for whatever that's worth. You can assign any track input to many recordable tracks at once, ie: I can plug my mic into a splitter and plug those 2 cables into track 1& 3 then assign the input of track 1 to both tracks 1 & 2, the same for input 3 to 3 & 4 giving me 4 vocal tracks and assign different effects to each track or I can assign the input of track 1 to record on all the other 31 tracks. Plus it never crashes and there's real knobs to turn and all I need to worry about with plugins is the instrument cable...;>)

The LCD screen could be bigger as the knob 'matrix' on the unit controls all sorts of neat stuff. This thing is really a computer and it does have a built in mouse/joystick. The sound quality is wonderful. Tons of Korg REMS effects - I only use stereo chorus. I record everything I do direct.

-Jim