For Audio that Awes, Get a DAW - Digital Audio Workstation - Product Information

Emedia Professional, Feb, 2000 by Mark Fritz

If you've been napping as the Digital Age has marched on, you may have missed the quiet revolution in digital audio that has been heating up during the past few years. Just as the video industry has promised and delivered complete PC-based video editing and processing solutions (Avid, FAST, Media 100, Matrox, PLAY, et al.), the audio recording industry has begun to deliver on the promise of complete audio recording, editing, mixing, and processing within the PC.

For years now, PC audio aficianados have wandered the earth in search of the "virtual recording studio" of age-old myth and legend: a one-card add-in that delivers all the features and power of a full-fledged recording studio. Well, we're still not quite there yet--no one card seems to do it all. But by piecing together several hardware components, you can get some serious digital recording power.

And even more importantly, as more and more digital audio solutions have emerged, once-high prices have dropped. This is essential for the market--after ail, what good are digital systems if they're more expensive than the old analog ones?

DIGIDESIGN--THE 400-POUND GORILLA

Actually, the computer industry has been supplying a complete digital audio solution for some time--the immensely successful Digidesign Pro Tools. The trouble with this system is that for small- and even medium-sized multimedia production companies, it is just too darn expensive. "It's going to cost you $30-40,000 for a complete Pro Tools system," says Yamaha's John Calder, noting that Digidesign's ProControl hardware control surface alone costs $11,500. "Don't get me wrong--Pro Tools is wonderful stuff, and Digidesign is the granddaddy of them all," says Calder. "But not all of us have the budget of Garth Brooks."

Digidesign pioneered the now-fashionable idea of open software systems by opening up its Pro Tools code to third-party software developers so they could make compatible plug-ins. This radical new idea proved to be a gold mine for Digidesign. Consequently, today just about any possible audio software tool you can think of is available as a Pro Tools plug-in. Abundant plug-ins have given Pro Tools a market advantage and helped Digidesign capture over 70 percent of the DAW market. Unfortunately, the product's near-monopoly position has also discouraged the company from lowering its prices.

Getting purchased by digital video market leader Avid Technology, Inc. in 1994 has helped Digidesign expand its market and grow even stronger. Most people now think of Pro Tools as the ideal digital audio product for film and video soundtracks, even though the pundits have long criticized Avid for not more tightly integrating its video (Media Composer) and audio (Pro Tools) products.

THE "PROJECT STUDIO" CONCEPT

It's not unusual for a professional recording studio to spend half-a-million dollars on analog and digital equipment, but not everyone with audio production chores needs top-shelf equipment to get the job done. There are many small- to medium-sized multimedia developers out there who may be interested in doing just a portion of their audio work in-house--just the simpler stuff. Luckily for them, a whole new class of DAW equipment has recently sprung up. In the biz, this segment of the market is known as "project studios." Project studios are small shops that don't churn out hundreds of CDs, radio spots, and TV commercials per week, the way professional recording studios do. They work on little projects one at a time--hence, the term.

LEVELS OF DIGITAL AUDIO CARDS

Project studio equipment is a step or two up from the "hobbyist/home studio" packages, which are aimed at amateur musicians. At the bottom of this scale are the consumer/gamer audio cards that come pre-installed on retail computer systems. The top end of this scale is represented by Pro Tools systems which start at $10K and by sync-video-oriented DAWs like the $12,995 SADiE system from Studio Audio Digital Equipment, Inc. (Nashville, Tennessee).

Theoretically, even the consumer/ gamer PC audio cards could serve as the basis for a DAW--all you really need is one input jack, analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion circuitry, and some good software. Audio pros and semi-pros turn up their noses at both consumer and hobbyist cards, even though some of the hobbyist cards (like those for Voyetra Turtle Beach, for example) come very close to offering functionality that could benefit any project studio.

The perceived problems with consumer and hobbyist audio cards begin with the fact that they are only 16-bit. Higher-level cards are 18-bit, 20-bit, or, ideally, 24-bit. Hobbyist cards also tend to emphasize MIDI at the expense of digital audio. Hobbyist cards don't have enough analog inputs and few, if any, digital I/Os. Also, they offer few if any digital effects like EQ, compression, or reverb. These then are the things that are conspicuously absent in the consumer/gamer/hobbyist cards, but conspicuously present in the project studio-level cards. Project studio audio cards start at about $2000 and go up to about $5000. These are the cards that are bringing production-quality digital audio recording to a vastly wider range of PC users, and as such are the primary focus of this article.