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I still don't really understand the rationale behind the new connector.

..and that is obvious from your comment.

Using a Lightening port may have form factor considerations, but the key reason for using it is that it dramatically increases the available bandwidth (10Gb/s) and flexibility of the iDevice interface port.

The way to think about Lightening is as a ePCI interface piped through a LVDS PHYS.
It is signal compatible with Display Port/HDMI as well as being able to support docking stations with multiple I/O interfaces. This is something that is actually very difficult to do with the 30 pin interface because it only had a single USB OTG port and a dog's breakfast of analog / low-speed digital interfaces.

What apple has done is push most of that 30 pins of crap to the external device where it belongs. Doing so frees up precious space on the iDevice that can be used to increase battery life, reduce parts count, and reduce the complexity of the iDevice motherboard.

Do recall that Apple did this before with the iPod line when they went from a FireWire based docking port to a USB OTG based docking port so that they could support Wintel hosts* as well as more advanced external docking stations.

While I dislike that Apple keeps the external interface developers on a very short leash, I expect to see a lot of excellent docking stations that make stuff like this:
http://www.alesis.com/iodock
look like a joke.

TL;DR: There are a lot of really good reasons to go with Lightening. Good change is good.

*(at the time few PC systems supported FireWire)

for my Alesis HD24 http://www.alesis.com/hd24 old IDE drives is what this multi-track recorder users.. a 500 or even a 100 gig drive is a waste in the machine as you are limited in number of songs and audio tracks. Plus I have had issues with the machines undo features and modern drives. and sadly the newest version still expects the same old IDE drives.. which are hard enough to find. now to hard drives containing classified information.. agency's are only allowed to reuse drives on systems of the same classification or higher.. so if the data was on a secret system, once wiped can only be used on other Secret or higher systems. other wise must be destroyed. a lot of this supposed classified information is sensitive but unclass. which is not a classification but a handling instruction. The unclass part is a classification, and the lowest protection level, so things slip, solders send computers to DRMO with out following procedure as its only unclass, but they forget the handling as procedure as SBU, and news stories like this get out. also most of this looks like corporate design information or even some engineers stored information on projects he is working on and all may be SBU or even fouo, but most companies do not have a requirement to wipe drives before reselling them or returning them from a lease, and if he did work on his home computer all bets are off.

This is probably better to do in hardware than in software. Here's what I'd try:

Get a phone that has a jack for a headset. These are usually a 3/32" connector that carries both microphone and audio. Connect to this an adaptor that splits it into two 1/8" connectors, one for headphones and one for mic. You probably have some headphones with a boom mic attached that has separate lines for audio and microphone. Just run the mic line into the mic port on the splitter, or use a lapel mic. Take the audio from the telephone, and feed it into a hardware mixer--just pick up any cheap mixer from Radio Shack. Then you can mix your computer's audio into the headphones as well. That way, you're not dependent on the computer working properly to be able to do your job, you can control audio source volumes quickly and independently from each other, and you could even add something like a DVD player or stereo to your mixer and be able to listen to that as well.

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could throw an audio compressor with sidechaining, such as the Alesis 3630, into the pipeline. Route the telephone's output so it goes through the compressor's sidechain channel, and run the computer's audio through the main input on the compressor. Then, whenever audio comes in through the phone line, the sound of the computer will automatically lower.

"Follow your ears and that predator-like blur and you got him in no time."

I've come to the realization that there are a lot of folks out there who either can't/don't use their ears, or simply prefer to listen to music while playing. Trying to "sneak" past an enemy with your cloak on without the mask of nearby gunfire is a sure way to end up with a few pistol rounds in the face. My favorite incident of killing the "I r teh ubar sneeky" sort happened in BF2:MC (the xbox version). The game was set up in such a way that anyone, friend or foe, within a certain radius could hear your open mic unless you made sure to hit the mute button. I was defending a flag and heard some guy breathing hard into his mic, checked the screen and saw the owner's voice was in red and therefore unfriendly. I did what anybody would do: bounced a grenade around the corner. 6 kills. Flag saved.

If you've got the equipment around, or are willing to spend the money an audio compressor will protect your ears from explosions while still allowing you to have the game volume high enough to hear incidental sounds like footsteps or clinking gear coming your way. An Alesis 3630 has a pretty terrible rep as a musical device and can be picked up used for under $50. Depending on how my mixing board is patched for other projects, I'll sometimes have a 3630 on my mic to level out the sound going to TS or in-game voip and a RNC1773 on the headphones. This setup removes some of the twitchy excitement from a game so it's not always in use, but it certainly makes long gaming sessions much more comfortable.

you forgot to mention this remarkable piece of tech: Alesis Fusion Synth

I don't know how well these work, and the web site is a little sparse on whether or not it has even been released, but it sounds like what you are looking for. http://www.alesis.com/product.php?id=96

If you buy one good multi-io card you can skip the mixer, skip any extra mic-preamps and drop the extra sound cards. With one card and a suitable recording software you'll get perfect multitrack recording.

Unfortunately only a few audio interfaces support 2 or more mic inputs, but this one from Alesis seems to have 8 http://www.alesis.com/product.php?id=94

I would favor a stand-alone solution over a low-cost computer interface solution. The Alesis HD24 is pretty much standard for this situation.

The company sells a firewire interface that won't be needed using his approach. So, while more Linux users might buy the HD24 product, none of them will buy the add-on FirePort.

So, they might say that those Linux users would have bought the HD24 and Fireport to use with a PC or Mac, if his driver was not available.

The issue here is more one of trade-secret.

"With their patent-pending method of writing to the hard drive HD24 and HD24XR are the first hard disk recorders built from the ground up"

So, go look up the patent (not need to do any reverse engineering and send it off to someone who lives in a country that doesn't have software patents. They will then be free to write a driver, but you won't be able to because you live in the US and have silly patent laws.

They may try and sue your arse if you send them a linux driver and ask them distribute it because you've already infringed upon their patent.

Note, it looks like the patent is still pending as none of the patents listed seem to be for a file system.

http://www.alesis.com/product.php?id=1

The previous link provided has broken menus at the top.

BTW, the article doesnt have a link for some of us lazy folks...
Here is a link to the product (Alesis HD24)...
Just curious... how can you prove that you didnt have any inside information on the specs and that you decoded it all by yourself?

This is a bit like Alesis AirFX or AirSynth, I guess. Nothing groundbreaking (airwavering) here.

I used to have something like that in my home studio . Alesis' Air FX seems like a hackworthy piece of hardware.

You can also use hardware for this if you want to compress everything coming out of your computer. The linked unit is about $80 new.

hahaha, the "ps5" is really an Alesis AirFX

Take a look at the Alesis MasterLink 9600.

It's a two-channel recorder (up to 24-bit/96kHz, but also has 88.2kHz to avoid aliasing when you eventually sample down to 44.1kHz). It has a built-in hard disk. It has SPDIF input and output.

However, it lacks any high-speed digital I/O. SPDIF can only do 20-bit, and only at real time. The built-in CD burner is only 4x. The CD will burn ISO 9660 discs, though, so you can transfer off the full 24-bit 96 kHz files -- of course you'll chew through 700MB with fairly few minutes of recording at that sample rate.

That said, it might satisfy the poster's requirements.

I've also seen a few cheap 4-track digital recorders that record 2 channels at a time to CompactFlash, but I don't know how good their ADCs are. I think the machines themselves are fairly small, though.

Mackie, Alesis, M-audio, Roland, and MOTU (among others) also make professional audio interface equipment for recording and monitoring/listening.

There are a couple of Creative-licensed OEM products (Some of the Alesis stuff looks awfully familiar...) but most of these companies provide far better hardware and software for "real" sound applications. A nice audio interface w/ a pair of active studio monitors will sound worlds better than some cheap consumer surround sound system. The prices are pretty much comparable with Creative's "good" stuff.

Get a digital effects module with a delay feature
.

I have an Alesis Nanoverb that I use for sound design work. You can get them on Ebay for under $100. Acording to the specs you can get over 1200ms delay per channel (loop left out to right in for 2400ms or about 2.5 seconds). Correcting the delay involves turning a nice analog knob.

The Alesis QuadraVerb has a full 5 seconds of delay per channel and should do the trick for you for about $130 .

SD

Get a digital effects module with a delay feature
.

I have an Alesis Nanoverb that I use for sound design work. You can get them on Ebay for under $100. Acording to the specs you can get over 1200ms delay per channel (loop left out to right in for 2400ms or about 2.5 seconds). Correcting the delay involves turning a nice analog knob.

The Alesis QuadraVerb has a full 5 seconds of delay per channel and should do the trick for you for about $130 .

SD

Get a digital effects module with a delay feature
.

I have an Alesis Nanoverb that I use for sound design work. You can get them on Ebay for under $100. Acording to the specs you can get over 1200ms delay per channel (loop left out to right in for 2400ms or about 2.5 seconds). Correcting the delay involves turning a nice analog knob.

The Alesis QuadraVerb has a full 5 seconds of delay per channel and should do the trick for you for about $130 .

SD

Alesis makes bad-ass 8-channel 20-bit digital audio recorders like the XT20 which store data on S-VHS tapes just fine . If you're just tuning in, the beauty of digital is that you can optimize your information storage/transmission for the medium/channel. (this is why Shannon is so cool) If you know the effective storage capacity of a piece of magnetic tape which is getting old has been stretched a bit, you encode the data at that capacity. That way the media can degrade a bit and you don't loose anything. If you use a nice robust encoding method, the media can degrade beyond that point and you still dont loose much. If you wanted to use regular VHS instead of a higher capacity tape, you just run the tape faster and don't pack the bits as tightly (probably not an issue as there's no mention in the article of using _actual_ VHS tapes, and 1. im sure they want to use more expensive media to prevent copying and 2. _actual_ VHS tapes should have been designed to hold about as much info as they do, and while going digital lets you optimize the space you have, HDTV may require more info than you can fit on conventional VHS tapes) Granted, you can destroy a tape, but you can destroy an optical disk too.

So, yeah, that was my short answer to "Seems to me you'd lose a lot of that HD picture after a few viewings too." ;-)

Alesis makes bad-ass 8-channel 20-bit digital audio recorders like the XT20 which store data on S-VHS tapes just fine . If you're just tuning in, the beauty of digital is that you can optimize your information storage/transmission for the medium/channel. (this is why Shannon is so cool) If you know the effective storage capacity of a piece of magnetic tape which is getting old has been stretched a bit, you encode the data at that capacity. That way the media can degrade a bit and you don't loose anything. If you use a nice robust encoding method, the media can degrade beyond that point and you still dont loose much. If you wanted to use regular VHS instead of a higher capacity tape, you just run the tape faster and don't pack the bits as tightly (probably not an issue as there's no mention in the article of using _actual_ VHS tapes, and 1. im sure they want to use more expensive media to prevent copying and 2. _actual_ VHS tapes should have been designed to hold about as much info as they do, and while going digital lets you optimize the space you have, HDTV may require more info than you can fit on conventional VHS tapes) Granted, you can destroy a tape, but you can destroy an optical disk too.

So, yeah, that was my short answer to "Seems to me you'd lose a lot of that HD picture after a few viewings too." ;-)

The Alesis ADAT File Streaming Technology, or ADAT/FST, records onto hard drives in a unique way designed from the ground up for multitrack audio. Many other hard disk recorders use the Microsoft-designed FAT32 or Apple's HFS+ file format. Since these were originally designed for the relatively small data files used in personal computers, not for real-time multitrack recording and playback, they break up audio into many small files scattered across the disk. Alesis ADAT/FST keeps all the tracks of a song in large associated clusters on the hard disk, so the disk doesn't have to "hunt" all over during recording and playback.

The Alesis ADAT File Streaming Technology, or ADAT/FST, records onto hard drives in a unique way designed from the ground up for multitrack audio. Many other hard disk recorders use the Microsoft-designed FAT32 or Apple's HFS+ file format. Since these were originally designed for the relatively small data files used in personal computers, not for real-time multitrack recording and playback, they break up audio into many small files scattered across the disk. Alesis ADAT/FST keeps all the tracks of a song in large associated clusters on the hard disk, so the disk doesn't have to "hunt" all over during recording and playback.

BTW, the current hot item in the digital audio world is 96Khz sampling rates. I don't know of a single instance of a human being able to distinguish 48Khz frequency tones. I can't explain it -- but then again the audio industry has never been ruled by logic.

It is an interesting synthesizer. However, it is difficult to program (it has an almost-noexistant user-interface), and has some stability problems. My friend tried upgrading the OS on the unit. Things got so fried, that he had to ship it back to Sweden to get it fixed.

Before this, the unit lost its memory, losing all of the synth presets on the unit. My friend was cheerful about it--he figured it was an oppertunity to learn synthesizer programming.

Keep in mind, also, that those old SID chips are really noisy.

Personally, I would go for an Andromeda from Alesis if I wanted to get a brand new genuine analog synthesizer.

- Sam

I seem to remember that someone made a device that encoded digital audio as an analog signal for recording onto a VCR (probably the same type of scheme used for putting data on there as well), turning it into a pre-DAT digital audio device. I remember reading about this system in an article on the gear Deadheads used for taping shows.

This place sells a complete deck for doing this, but looks to be more specialized (ie, it just uses the media rather than a standard VHS deck).