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Hiall! I have a growing desire to have a portable rig for on site recording. By "portable" I don't mean in a back pack, I mean easily put in a car and less cumbersome than the desktop I'm using in the studio. I'm on a tight budget too and I already have some good gear:

Lucid 8 channel converter, some nice preamps and mics. The lucid unit has ADAT and aes-ebu outputs.

The ideal thing (if it existed) would be an ADAT to firewire converter to so I could plug my AD into a laptop, but all the FW interfaces seem to have mic pres and options that I don't really need. Another way would be a rackmounted desktop setup, but I'm not sure what are the options and how big it would be with the screen and keyboard...

What would be viable options for a minimal cost?

Thanks for the input!

you might consider one of those DJ type racks with 6-10 vertical units for the PC, Adat converters and preamps.
Mount a TFT to the tilted rack rails.
Maybe even some space is left for a controller there, too.

If you don't find a matching 4 unit case for the PC (they are usually heavy and often too deep in size), just fix a regular open PC box with screws to to the ground and close the front by a few dummy 19" metal parts.

cheers, Tom

The M-Audio Lightbridge or Firewire 18/14 are the smallest ADAT interfaces I can think of. The Yamaha i88x is the cheapest & best value I can think of.

Yeah, the rackmounted pc is appealing, although a bit cumbersome...

Eric, thanks for the info, I didn't know such a box existed... It is just what I would need to add a laptop to my rig. I'm aware of the Yamaha interface too, did you try it yourself? How do the ad and preamps stand?

2 ada8000= 1 2space rack
keyboard mouse and monitor=1box or suitcase with foam cut out to fit the pieces
tower=1box

this is nothing big to carry to do high quality live 16track recording. the same gear took a whole bus or truck just a few years ago...

the pc could be rack mounted or just use a good quality case like an antec tx series. i move those cases all the time with no troubles at all..

btw-don't forget a splitter snake to use the house mics so you won't have to bring another set of stands and mics if you are planning to mic a whole band......

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: garyb on 2006-09-14 19:59 ]</font>