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Hi all, new guy here. I know nothing at all about digital recording, but would like to get a recorder soon. So I've got a few questions:

1) Are all recorders compatible with all others? My buddy has a fostex mr-8 if he burned a CD could I pop that in another brand recorder and record on that? I'm talking about the under $1,200 Korg /fostex/boss type.

2) what do all tje numbers mean? 24 bit, etc? And what does the 16x mean when referring to a CD-RW drive?

Thanks a million for any responses! I don't have a clue about this.

Comments

therecordingart Sun, 01/02/2005 - 21:04

I don't know if I understand correctly.....do you want to have someone else record some tracks and then bring them over to your unit to add to the previously recorded tracks? (i.e. your buddy records some drums on his unit and you want to add some guitar tracks)

I'm not too familiar with the all-in-one units, but my understanding is that Roland makes a damn fine unit in that market...I could be wrong.

Sorry I could be of great assistance but I gave it a shot.

ghellquist Mon, 01/03/2005 - 00:38

el84ster wrote:
1) Are all recorders compatible with all others? My buddy has a fostex mr-8 if he burned a cd could I pop that in another brand recorder and record on that? I'm talking about the under $1,200 korg/fostex/boss type.

2) what do all tje numbers mean? 24 bit, etc? And what does the 16x mean when referring to a cdrw drive?

First of all, those are not stupid questions. But the technology is sort of complicated.

My recommendation for you is to start by reading a lot. Perhaps ask to borrow your buddys box and the manual and poke around.

1 -- yes and no. All units with CD-s I know of will allow you to burn "Audio CD-s". By this I mean that you can pop the CD into any Walkman and listen to them. This is a perfectly good and easy way to transfer stereo sound from one machine to another. With good quality. But, and here is the no, it is not an easy way to transfer many channels (say if you have 5 channels for the drums). When you try to transfer many channels, machines are no longer as compatible.

2 -- 24 bits is the number of bits you record with. More bits gives more details in the sound, but since 16bits is more or less what it takes, everything above that might be nice, but you have to use the first 16 effectively before getting any effect. It is sort of like comparing a 500 horsepower car with a 300 horsepower one. The difference is not very noticable in every day use, 300 is plenty enough.
16x generally means that the CD can (in theory) burn at 16times nominal speed. So 16 minutes of audio would burn in 1 minute. (A bit of sceptic attitude is a good thing here, it always seems to take longer time from some reason).

Good luck