Small Studio With Splendid Equipment, Need a help to manage... Options

[cabasa]

Hello everybody!

I need your help. I have to manage small DAW based on ProTools HD system. Budget: ~EUR40,000.00

I need to understand how is reasonable this compilation or not:

· I need ONE, but high class tube mic with ONE high class mic preamp/compressor/eq for recording pop-style vocals (in general). It would be very good for me to know outstanding industry-standard combination of studio mic/preamp for pop vocal recording (if it is)
· 2 or 8 ch. A/D converter for ProTools HD sound routing specially. Apegee Rosetta 200/800 is good solution (not orginal Digidesign Protools HD converters) I heard. Or anything else?
· Well, Protools HD cards + G5
· STANDALONE final compressor/limiter (like TC Finalizer etc.) for final mix processiong. The sound goes from HD digital OUT to final comp/limiter digital IN. Then it goes to the second G5 audiocard digital IN to Bias Peak (for example) to make final stereo mix bounce.
· I need 2-ch. D/A converter to send the final mix to studio monitoring interface (like Presonus Central Station http://www.presonus.com/centralstation.html ) to hear all the sound which I ugly did.
· Active acoustic monitoring system Genelec 31A or 32A. I like Genelec's hi freq "sharpy" sound.

That's all.
I ask you, gentlemen the professionals, to help and give me an advice to complete this kind of studio!
What the best indastry-standard couple of tube mic/preamp for pop-vocal recording? Converters for Protools HD? Final stand-alone compressor/limiter with aes/ebu in/out?
Neutral sounding studio monitoring interface? Active monitor system?

Thank you very much in advance and excuse me for my ugly english.

Emegical IM

[flemming]

Let the flames begin, and Cheers!

Hi Keef

Yeah, and API/Studer combo is lovely!! Then again, it's not very versatile, and even though the 2" might be able to play back in 50 years (after a quick tour thru the oven), how likely is it that you can find a well calibrated 2" studer in 50 years? When did anyone last put a new 2" deck on the market? Let's face it, tape is history. Unfortunately. It was fun. But it's over. It's even difficult to buy new tape these days ...

I totally agree with you about the problems with standards in the digital world. Basically, you have to stick with your old computers when you upgrade, else there's no chance in hell you're gonna be able to play back those old (hehe) 1992 recordings. On the other hand, this isn't new. If you upgraded from a 16 to a 24 track tape machine, you had to keep the 16 track to be able to play back your 16 track tapes. And that was IMMENSELY more expensive than buying a new computer and not selling the old one is today.

These days, with A/D technology and all, I don't really feel the tape/digi discussion is very interesting anymore. Digi sounds great now. It didn't 5 years ago. And it CERTAINLY didn't 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 years ago (many people forget that digital recordings actually started in the mid 70s), but I'm quite happy with it now. True, you don't get saturation and tape compression, but that's OK. Just go for something else squashing the stuff. It's music, there are no right ways or wrong ways of tracking it. Whatever works on the way in! Which brings me to what I personally think is the more important bit: INPUT! You can never have too many new AND vintage mics, pres, eqs, and comps. They all have different flavours, and if you use high quality stuff on the way in and good modern A/Ds, chances are you'll have a great sound, plus you'll have the editing capabilities expected of modern day studios.

On a more philosophical level (sorta), I think the whole editing process is kinda cooler now than it used to be. Many engineers (especially older ones) talk about the good old days when people could play and and and, but to be honest in the good old days you did millions of takes, punching sylables in and all, and it wasn't any better. Obviously, if you had someone who could actually sing or play a great first take all was great. It still is. But that's not the norm, and never was. At least not since the advent of multitrack tape. But I digress: What I REALLY like about editing in the digital realm is the fact that what used to be boring cleaning up jobs on tape has today become an intricate part of the creative process. I love that I as a producer am much more involved in the actual music making by the choises I make in editing, and I love the freedom of being able to track whatever I want to without having to think about track counts etc, you can really go out on a whim these days, try out stuff etc, without having to worry about anything. That's cool. Granted, you have to be a good judge of when things start to get overdone (which a lot of people aren't, unfortunately), but again, that's not really that different from the albums of yesteryear. The shitty, overproduced, poorly conceived albums from back then just aren't played anymore, but BOY were they there!!! :-)