[PD] [OT] advice about low budget multichannel hardware configs

[Justin Glenn Smith]

How important is phase between the channels? If channels drifting out of phase would
be a problem, mixing in soundcards that do not share the firewire clock is out of
the question. If they do not need to be in phase (ie. the channels are used for
isolation rather than mixed for virtual positioning), then there are a larger number
of cheaper options to consider. If they need to be in fixed phase than as far as I
know firewire cards with a shared clock is your cheapest option aside from soldering
soundcards to one another so they share a single clock. Firewire clock chaining is
not limited to OSX, it will work under Linux too, and I would be surprised if it did
not work under Windows.

jurgen wrote:
> You have to be realistic - 25 channels is an extremely hardware
> ineffective configuration because audio interfaces come by increments of
> 8. Meaning for 25 channels you need 4 of those.
> I believe you can do it cheapest if you use OS X: you may borrow from
> friends any brand of device and then create in OS X an 'aggregate'
> device. This combines any number of any audio interfaces into one big
> virtual interface that you then can address with jack. It also solves
> the problem of the 25th channel because the aggregate device may include
> the machines in-built audio hardware on top of fw/usb things.
> 
> Good luck
> Jurgen
> 
> On Oct 25, 2009, at 12:32 AM, Greg Pond wrote:
> 
>> I am helping some friends make their first PD sound installation. They
>> want 25 channels simultaneously running prerecorded samples and have a
>> limited budget and as yet own no equipment. I use the presonus firepod
>> external card in my work which could work with a single cpu chaining
>> 3-4 of firepods together for their project but I doubt their budget
>> can support buying so many of them. For amps we could build 25 simple
>> chip amps with op amp ICs to keep costs down but those that I have
>> built in the past are useful for low volume only.  If anyone has other
>> hardware configurations and amplifier schematics that they use I would
>> be grateful for suggestions.
>>
>> thanks
>>
>> Greg
>>
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