Steinberg Nuendo with a UA Powered Plug in card are a good combo for most purposes. Of course you could spend a lot more on digital outboard eq, etc. YMMV

Thanks, I've been hearing good things about Nuendo a lot lately.

I'd say Wavelab 3.0, the RME card with all different digital flavors, the Waves Gold Bundle, and (depending on price range);

A) Lucid AD, Mytek AD, or Crane Song HEDD

B) Entech DA, Lucid DA, Mytek DA, or (included in the HEDD).

And a pair of Dunlavys. Test a bunch of amps- they seem to like Haflers. Of course, other people use other gear and get good results.

Most importantly, spend a couple grand on a good acoustician.

I use Nuendo and Wavelab with Waves plugins and it rocks pretty hard.
Opus

Who makes the RME card? Where can I get info? Also who makes Wavelabs? Thanks for the info guys, keep it comin.

Steinberg make Wavelab. It's a very very good program. I also use Nuendo which is good for tracking and mixing but no use at all for mastering really - it's not designed for that job.

SADiE has very good, very neutral sounding hardware and the interface is OK. However, it is very expensive for what it does, compared to other DAWs these days.

RME make the hammerfall range of cards which are excellent. http://www.rme-audio.com (I think) their converters are also excellent for the money. Steinberg sell rebadged RME stuff for use with Nuendo. I'd get it from RME though - go where the support is strongest. Steinberg's tech support is somewhat lacking in certain areas.

A Hammerfall comes with a word clock output but using the ADAT connection should take care of clocking issues. SADiE also has a WC out. Don't worry about clocks for now, worry about the quality of the available plugins (especially EQ as most EQ plugs are just awful in comarison to their analog counterparts) and worry about the quality of the converters.

Hope this helps.

All good information, except, IMO,

Originally posted by Rog:

A Hammerfall comes with a word clock output but using the ADAT connection should take care of clocking issues. .

I have had some bad experiences relying on lightpipe transmitted clock information, and just assumed they were isolated until a number of people confirmed for me that the clock embedded in lightpipe is often garbage for some reason. Of course, most good A/D's have decent clocks in them anyway, and you can get most cards to slave to the AES or SPDIF input, which I believe is a cleaner way to transmit clock.