Recording - January 2011 - 40

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

The JoeCo BBR1 BlackBox Recorder
Multitrack digital recording—no pain, no hassle, and no computer

If you want to do multitrack recordings of live shows, the most obvious tool for the job is a computer, but their bulk and tendency to crash at critical moments may be discouraging, to say nothing of buying/adapting an interface/mixer/splitter system for them. Maybe you’re the FOH engineer and are happy with the board you have already. Maybe you’ve been called in to work with an FOH board you’ve never seen before. Maybe you’re just getting started, and don’t yet have the trunkful of snakes and splitters that a traditional live recording gig requires. And maybe you’d love a way to avoid, amidst the rush and bustle of soundchecks and prep for a live gig, the hassle of setting up a computer, verifying your settings, making sure that your interface is properly routed, and figuring out the best way to wire it into FOH without annoying the FOH engineer. That’s what Joe Bull of UK-based JoeCo has come up with in the BBR1 BlackBox Recorder. It is, literally and figuratively, a black box—a self-contained system that patches almost invisibly into an existing FOH console, records up to 24 channels of digital audio (from 16/44.1 to 24/96) to a USB 2.0 hard disk, and plays it back for sound checks and monitoring, all with minimal fuss and cabling. I had a chance to play with one for a few days, and was very impressed by its elegance; it’s a nice counterpoint to the more traditional live-recording methods discussed elsewhere in this issue. The black box The BBR1 is a 1U rackmount box. The front panel has a large color graphic LCD and touch-sensitive backlit controls with no moving parts. There are big buttons for Play, Stop, and Record, four smaller buttons for menu navigation, marker setting, and loop playback, and a circular dial for selecting and setting parameters. There is no button at the center of the dial for confirming settings—it took
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a surprisingly long while for this habitual iPod user to get used to how menu selection and parameter settings worked. Filling out the front panel is a set of 24 level meters and record/playback LED indicators. On the rear panel there are 24 channels of I/O and eight channels of loopthrough (more about these in a second), a headphone jack, plus a variety of sync and control ports: 1/4" for linear timecode or a footswitch, a 9-pin DSub control connector, MIDI In, a PS/2 keyboard port (for renaming tracks), RCA I/O for S/PDIF clocking, and a USB 2.0 port for an external disk. The BBR1 uses a wallwart power supply with interchangeable plugs for worldwide use. Ins and outs The basic BBR1 that I tested comes with three 8-channel ‘looms’ with 25-pin connectors on one end and eight 1/4" TRS plugs on the other. (You can get versions with fully balanced I/O on six 25-pin connectors, or unbalanced analog plus digital I/O on AES/EBU or ADAT.) The looms just plug into the FOH console’s inserts—they take audio out of the board, split it off for A/D conversion, and send it right back to FOH transparently. In fact, each I/O channel has a relay so that audio is passed properly even if the BBR1 is turned off, so FOH audio is never adversely affected. Your FOH engineer will love that! (You can avoid inserts and use channel direct outputs, too.) What if you need to use a console insert during the show? The eight loopthroughs act as inserts on channels 17–24, so you can plug outboard equipment into them and use it as per usual. Similarly, a variety of internal and external clocking options are provided to assure that the audio you record is seamlessly integrated with anything else that’s already in the live rig, including sync with video gear. About the only thing you need to prepare with care is your USB 2.0 drive. The BBR1 can format and partition drives—it uses the

FAT32 scheme, readable by both Windows and Mac. You’ll want a big, fast drive (7200 RPM or solid-state) with an external (non-bus) power supply. 24 channels of 24/96 is a lot of data, and a cheap old drive will choke on you—I found that out the hard way. Test your drives first, aided by the front-panel display of disk activity, before heading to a gig. It only takes a couple of minutes at most to be assured your disk will work... or to see the DISK TOO SLOW message. Easy as 1 2 3 Once I had a disk formatted and installed, the BBR1 was dead-simple to use. Plug it into the inserts, hit Record, and within a few seconds—it has to create a dated folder and numbered file—it’s recording, and will happily do so until you run out of disk space. It will automatically split files into pieces when it goes over a preset size (1, 2, or 4 GB) so as not to create files too big for your DAW. You can globally set input level to +4 or –10, lock out playback so that you don’t accidentally play recorded files over FOH, create a custom headphone monitor mix with autogain control... and otherwise, just sit back, enjoy the show, and let the BBR1 do its thing. When you’re done, just unplug the drive and attach it to your DAW for further work. Every recordist has certain hot-button issues that make a job either a pleasure or a pain. If you’re excited by the idea of a no-computer solution to multitrack digital audio that is almost completely invisible to FOH and requires very little prior preparation and no jockeying during the show, then the JoeCo BBR1 might be just what the doctor ordered for your live recording headaches. Price: $2495 (unbalanced I/O version) More from: JoeCo, www.joeco.co.uk; distributed in USA by FullScale AV, www.fullscaleav.com.

http://www.joeco.co.uk http://www.fullscaleav.com

Recording - January 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2011