Hi, my name is Paul. I am electrical engineering student in the latter half of my BS degree, and happen to be a violinist. My girlfriend Erin is now receiving three bachelor degrees in music for composition, theory, and flute performance. She is going to continue her education and get a PHD in comp. Her success in the classical has been relatively well received she just won a national competition. I know she has broad intentions for the use of her compositional skills. She is planning to write music for many venues, including popular music, movies, games, TV, commercials, events, and classical music.

I would like to set up a professional composition studio for her. Eventually I have some rooms professionally built and treated for this purpose. One room will contain the comp studio and the other room will be a performance area with natural reverb. Here are some of the requirements for the studio. It will be a computer based studio with full Dolby digital monitoring capabilities. I feel that Mackie monitors will more than adequate for this task. I only need a simple recording setup a hard drive multi-track (Alesis ADAT HD24 Digital Hard Disk Recorder) seems to be a great solution. To go along with this a small microphone closet with name brand quality microphones. I do not need to break the bank where it doesn’t matter audio recording is not the focus and defiantly not a money maker in this case. I will build a silent high end computer with multiple monitor outputs, one of which would be dedicated to a projector. The computer part is a no brainier I will just design it for the job.

This is the part where I ask the forum for its knowledge please chime in with equipment. Money is no object here; just keep it focused to composition because this is a planned career move. I would like to know what is available for this type of work. This studio will need to be equipped with midi hardware, sequencers, samplers, and synthesizers. I want to have the ability to make absolutely any sound, whether software or hardware driven I want only the best. All mixing will be software based with a control surface. Software is going to be a huge expense I am already familiar with many titles. She will need a full size digital piano and a separate key board. I need to come up with a method to drive the active studio monitors. I am looking for something more substantial than a simple audio card. I do not need record ability from the audio card just d/a converter because I am going to download all recorded data from the multi track. I would like an external decoder. I may need two d/a one for normal stereo and another to decode Dolby format. Some products from Apogee and RME have caught my eye, but I would like some more input on this. If you have any suggestions I would be very grateful.

Thank you,
Paul