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Does anyone own one of these? It looks tempting for a budget minded guy like me, (about $800.00) but would just like to know if this piece is something you see often in the big mastering rooms.
Thanks!
~Bill

Comments

JonKraft Fri, 09/17/2004 - 12:55

Of course these says nothing to it's performance in a mastering room... But, I took one of these out on tour so I could playback prerecorded tracks in high resolution for my electronic band. It was great. No problems to speak of.
However, durring that tour, I did stop to see a friend's mastering room... He had one there, and said he had all kinds of problems with it... but I dont recall specifics, something with the harddrive failing.. I think...
I thought it was funny that mine was in a DIY van-tour environment and performing well, while his was in this nice safe mastering room dying on him...

I think Roger Nichols endorses the Masterlink... haha.

Joe Crawford Sun, 09/19/2004 - 12:04

After replacing a bad CD drive (failed after a couple of week's use) and upgrading the hard drive to 32gig, mine comes in handy if I have to do any off-site stereo recording. I have it mounted in a portable rack case with two Grace pre-amps. After recording a performance, I take back to the studio and dump the tracks to my DAW. I also use it to hold and play-back a few reference CDs while mixing/finalizing. As someone mentioned above, I don't know anyone that uses the on-board DSP functions for finalizing or mastering.

It has saved my butt a couple of times when, because of certain config. problems, I couldn't render down a mix on the DAW without getting dropouts, click, crackles, etc. I just routed the mix to the Masterlink via S-PDIF at 88.2-by-24 bit. Then, I routed it back to the DAW (staying in the digital domain the whole time) for polishing and finalizing.

Joe Crawford
Stony Mountain Studio
Shanks, WV 26761

anonymous Tue, 09/21/2004 - 02:20

Joe Crawford wrote: mine comes in handy if I have to do any off-site stereo recording. I have it mounted in a portable rack case

I'm with you there, Joe: mine is also in a flightcase along with my HEDD, and I use the combo to take to client studios for (mostly) analog transfers.

One producer I work with has a nice Focusrite-based residential, and I'm over there a couple of times a month taking mixes off 1/2". The HEDD has a very good ADC, and the ML is easy to use so it makes the transfers a breeze. When I get back to base I usually write CD24s from the hard drive, pop them in the SADiE and away we go - a good stop-gap to save me shelling out for analog machine for a while at least.

A question for Mark Wilder - how do you go about reclocking your ML? Does it take AES black? - I have a spare feed from my studio clock...

anonymous Tue, 09/21/2004 - 13:15

Ammitsboel wrote:

Does it take AES black?

Do you mean AES with only sync?

It takes a recloking device to get completely rid of jitter and reclock a signal.

Interesting - didn't know it did that but I RTFM and there it was on page 7. D'oh! This may be of academic interest only as at the moment the ML is stand-alone, doesn't play through the DAW (as posted previously I go in via CD24s) and is heard via my DAC-1 and not its own converters - I use the DAC-1's front panel switch to route either fom the SADiE (AES) or the ML (SPDIF) and this works well for reference purposes.

However -

I have wondered about changing my (all-digital) workflow, so using AES black (yes, it is sync-only, BTW) to the ML I can clock the whole lot to my reference clock and play the ML through the outboard rather than playing the SADiE out in a loop, thus saving a couple of steps. This would probably only apply to those jobs where the ML has been used to dump analog tapes to its hard drive - there'd be no advantage if I was sent a CDROM to work from. I can feel a digital router coming on!

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