ProAudio Review - May 2008 - (Page 56) AUDIO EQUIPMENT EXCHANGE ProAudio Review ACOUSTICS CONTROL PANELS ® RPG DIFFUSOR SYSTEMS, INC. Listen To The Music, N o t T h e R o o m TM Absorption, Diffusion & Total Room Solution Packages. Find an Authorized Dealer @ EQUIPMENT ALAN SMART COMPRESSORS www.rpginc.com/proaudio CASES Case Specialists We Will Beat ANY Price! 1-877-692-2738 www.NewYorkcasecompany.com • C1, C2 & Multi-Channel Versions • Smart 2 Tools - SSL to Pro Tools Interfaces • Smart D.I. Boxes All Exclusively Distributed by: 323-469-1186 • SunsetSound.com | SUMMARY The 1200F is a great-sounding FireWire interface priced at less than you’d expect to pay for a dozen pro-quality mic preamps. With the monitor mixer, four headphone amplifiers, and expansion via two sets of ADAT Optical I/O and stereo digital ports, two MIDI inputs and outputs, plus a full version of Mackie’s Tracktion 3 DAW software, and you have the basis for a very sophisticated recording system. With the 1200F’s versatility, it would fit nicely either in a one-room personal studio or a traditional studio and control room setup. There’s a lot to the 1200F, and it deserves a detailed application guide in addition to the fairly basic manual. While many individual users may be initially attracted to the 1200F simply for its large number of inputs, it really doesn’t show its full colors until you start recording the whole band, giving everyone a custom headphone mix while tracking, and then mixing the project in surround. Mike Rivers, a retired location sound recording engineer, operates a studio in Falls Church, Va. STUDIO | REVIEW example, drums) would be welcome. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to use a foot switch for swapping between the two sets of control room monitors, but a switch to turn the monitor mix on or off in the second set of monitor jacks would be handy. The alternate monitor jacks could then feed a set of speakers in the studio so the musicians could hear the playback without coming into the control room. Since not all inputs and outputs are available at higher sample rates, having the deselected channels grayed out on the mixer screen would reduce confusion. Finally, and this is strictly personal thing, but I found the concept of a switching among a bunch of similar-looking mixers to be confusing. I’d rather see a more conventional mixer layout with the various outputs controlled by traditional “send” controls on a single screen. MACKIE Continued From Page 55 reason to question them if something doesn’t sound right. There’s something here for everybody … almost. But there are some things I’d like to see done a little differently. Here are some of my thoughts: Talkback goes only to the headphone outputs. It would be nice if it also went to the FireWire outputs for slating tracks. The ability to copy and paste between mixers would be a real timesaver, allowing you to use one mix as a template for others. Along the same line, rather than having each mixer’s DAW returns hard-wired to a specific pair of FireWire streams, I’d like to be able to select the DAW outputs used in each mix. If only one mix of the recorded tracks is required, there’s no need to send multiple copies of it back through the FireWire stream. And along those same lines, being able to bring more than one DAW stem mix into each mixer (for 56 | ProAudio Review | May 2008 www.proaudioreview.com http://www.panelauthority.com http://www.acousticsfirst.com http://www.rpginc.com/proaudio http://SunsetSound.com http://www.NewYorkcasecompany.com http://www.proaudioreview.com
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