Recording - August 2017 - 8

TalkBack
Storage and safety
Hi, I wonder if you could answer this question for me: my
2007 Mac Pro died and I am about to purchase an entirely
new Pro Tools setup, complete with new hardware, etc. The
ports on the new Mac Pro are now all Thunderbolt, so I am
having to upgrade my recording and sample player hard
drives too. Could you please recommend both a high(est) end
and a medium end solution for me?
And also, is RAID a good idea or not? I don't feel really
that I need realtime backup, as I religiously back up my
sessions at the end of every day.... and also I hear that
writing is slightly slower with RAID. What do the pros use?
Thanks so much! Love the mag!
Chris Dixon
via email
Hi, Chris! We're not in a position to recommend particular
brands of computer storage products, as we don't review them, but
I can give you a few general pointers that other readers might value.
You can get a 7200 RPM internal hard drive with 2 TB of storage
for less than $100. You then need something to store, power, and
connect to the bare drive(s). A multiple-drive Thunderbolt enclosure
will set you back another $200 to $400, but offers a number
of advantages. It should be designed to let you use its drives as
individual destinations or as parts of a RAID, and to pull out and
replace drives easily (hopefully without tools). It's seen as a single
node on your Thunderbolt bus, it will have a built-in power supply
to assure steady power for your disks, and it will often have a fan
to keep your drives cool.
If you want one big drive for recordings and another for sample
libraries, you could get two Thunderbolt 2 drives and daisychain
them or put two internal drives in a 2-disk enclosure. Every drive
you want to set up as a RAID will require an extra disk, so the
enclosure would then have to hold 3 or 4 disks in all. How large
an enclosure you need depends on how much storage space you
want to have and what kind of RAID, if any, you'll want to run.
These days, the majority of RAIDs (Redundant Arrays of
Independent Disks) are intended for data safety. Identical
data bytes are written to two disks at once, with this "mirrored"
setup providing instantaneous verification and backup of all
data. That way you don't lose the fantastic session you just
tracked but haven't backed up yet when there's a hard drive
hiccup. In the creative world, RAIDs are used for mission-critical
data that can't survive even a tiny disk problem and can't wait
for a daily backup: video, computer animation, and multitrack
audio postproduction for film/video.
"The pros" may or may not use RAID, but you'll be more
likely to see RAID or NAS (Network Attached Storage) at

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large facilities using multiple computers in multiple rooms. Depending on the size of the projects you're working on and
how much data you generate per day between backups, a
RAID might be overkill for you, and that's ultimately your call.
One more thing: If you have money to spend, consider replacing
your sample player hard disk with a Solid State Drive. SSDs
are incredibly fast and will help the performance of your DAW
when using a lot of libraries and virtual instruments at once,
but they are quite expensive and still need to be backed up
regularly (although not as regularly as your recordings). They're
best suited as OS drives, and for sample libraries and virtual
instrument content that you'll put into your computer (write) once
and then access when using your DAW (read) many times.
I hope this helps. Thanks for the kind words and thanks for
reading. -MM

Return of the Gizmo
Hi Paul Stamler: I read your article about the "gizmo" for
adjusting the impedance of a Shure SM58 [available online
at recordingmag.com], great work! I have a Shure SM58
and I removed the transformer inside. Now the capsule directly connects to the mixer input; without the transformer
it sounds better with my voice, much softer in the high mids!
Now I don't know what resistor I should use to have best results
if I build a Gizmo for this modified mic. The capsule has about
10-12 Ω impedance (I read that somewhere in the net) and my
mixer has 2000 Ω input impedance. So what resistor shall I use?
Joachim
Munich, Germany
Paul Stamler replies:
Hello Joachim: I don't know precisely; the answer will
depend on the turns ratio of the transformer that you removed.
If it was, say, 1:4 (a pretty likely deduction from available
data), that would mean that when you plugged the unmodified
mic into your mixer, the coil would see 2000/16 or 125 Ω.
The Gizmo brings the mixer's input impedance down to
about 500 Ω, which would mean that with a Gizmo in the
circuit, the coil in the unmodified mic (with the transformer still
in place) would have been seeing 500/16, or 31.25 Ω. So,
with the transformer removed, you'd get a similar damping
effect by loading the coil directly with 31.25 Ω.
You might try building a Gizmo using a 33.2 ohm resistor
(the nearest value in the 1%-tolerance series) just to see
how you like it. Expect some level drop when you're using
it. Oh, and without the transformer, you'll need to leave
phantom power turned off ... but I'll bet you already knew
that. Peace-PJS

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RECORDING August 2017

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