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

[Greg Pond]

Good question here- this work is about creating excessive chatter and
doesnt rely on a fixed phase and sync'ed clocks so the inexpensive
options you mentioned would be welcome. I should have mentioned this
part in my first post.

thanks

Greg

On Sun, Oct 25, 2009 at 3:09 AM, Justin Glenn Smith
<noisesmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Pd-list at iem.at mailing list
>>> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
>>> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pd-list at iem.at mailing list
>> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
>> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
>>
>
>