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As this is a new forum, I might as well introduce myself. And hopefully all other Radar Forum atendees will present themselves as well!

My name is Mats Olsson and I live in Sweden. Have been professionally involved in music since late 70's. First by organizing concerts & gigs for local bands, later on I ran a rock-club with some friends and we had domestic and international indie-bands, we also arranged an annual outdoor festival with lots of great bands. All that time I also played in bands and became more and more involved in live-sound engineering (and to some extent producing & engineering studio recordings). As a lot of oportunities arised we started a record label... but that is another "charming" story.

In the second half of the eighties I went on the road quite a lot as a soundengineer, doing mostly FOH but also did some monitormixing. By 1990 I was VERY bored with traveling all over europe (and elsewhere, spent quite a lot of time in the USA as well). Time to reposition, I thought. With perfect timing I was now asked to be in charge of a newly started recording studio in my hometown, Eskilstuna (1 hour west of Stockholm, Sweden). Of course I was intrested, especially as I did not have to invest any money of my own and the Studio is still owned by the same great organisation. Most of the recordings where for songdemos and pre-production for recording in bigger studios. Now, almost twelve years later and 2 major reconstructions of this studio, we are busier than ever. After the last major haul-over we purchased a Radar II to replace an analog 2" 16Ch analog recorder. The studio is booked solid almost every day and night of the year and the phone rings all day long, it has been like that for the last 8 years actually... ...and our "competitors" also get quite a few bookings from us because of the demand (and they used to hate us in the beginning!). Everybody's happy now!

On top of it all we also organise many seminars/workshops that are free for all our clients. The topics are not always related to recording/production - they also cover a wide range topics such as songwriting, bass/guitar/drums/vocals, copyright & legal matters, "how to get gigs" and so on. Every summer since 1991 we also host a 3-day outdoor festival with lots of bands "on the verge of stardom", admission is free BTW!

Best regards,
Mats Olsson
Studio Ambassaden, Eskilstuna

PS.
I have a side-business, together with my best friend I have a CD-premastering studio and a CD-R duplication service. Great addition to our other activities!

Comments

Ang1970 Sun, 03/11/2001 - 03:50

Welcome aboard Mats! Good to have you with us. :)

I recently did a few days work (grudgingly) on a Radar, and was impressed by the sound quality. Without any fancy outboard converters, this thing sounds great right out of the box. Unfortunately, I was not so impressed by the editing functions. A simple cut and paste seems to take ages to complete (compared to my usual m.o., ProTools). I'm wondering about the new Radar that's coming out. Will the sound be as good or better? Will editing be a little faster? Any other operational differences? And oh yea, OMF?

anonymous Sun, 03/11/2001 - 05:23

We bought the Radar II as a replacement for an Analog tape recorder. It has been super-nice, real reliable & easy to operate, sounds teriffic, inexpensive backup media and so on.
The radar is not a DAW, we have a DAW also but would never dream of using one on a tracking session. If we need the DAW funcionality we just dump those tracks to the DAW.
It seems like future Radar software updates gives more DAW-like funcions.

This is a serious pro-grade recording device that gives very good client, the Radar has probably recorded more hits than any other hard-disk based recording system.

/Mats

robin Sun, 03/11/2001 - 08:31

Hi guys,

I'm the support manager at iZ. Like Mats I was on the road for many years as a guitarist and I eventually got tired of the grind.

I began writing and producing and ended up sitting in "the chair" because I heard what I wanted in my head and found that I could get there faster than some of the engineers I worked with at the time. I did a stint as a recording instructor and then moved into post work and composing for picture.

I had a PT system that I worked with for a long time and then I got RADAR. The RADAR II blew me away (for me tracking with PT is like trying to BBQ a steak with a toaster). I was an instant fan after the first tracking session I did and after that I only touched PT for “finessing” stuff (anybody else troubled by the weirdness that happens to your audio inside a DAW?).

When I got a call from my friend iZ founder, RADAR inventor Barry Henderson asking if I was interested in joining the company I jumped at the opportunity. It's a great company to work for made up of people that have a passion for audio and doing things right, which is a very big job by the way ;-)

Our corporate vision is to create visionary audio products; our mission is recording the world. All this just so you'll know where I'm coming from.

As for RADAR 24's present editing capabilities, as Mats said it is not a DAW. It is however an amazingly fast assembly editor. One RADAR user in the US uses it to produce 50 to 60(!) radio spots a day. Think of it as a 2" machine on steroids with a built in digital grease pencil.

RADAR is designed to work with a mixer. We have a Sony DMXR-100 here at iZ and it's a match made in heaven. For the tweak head thing that I like to do occasionally with a DAW, I just dump across in real time via AES or TDIF (yes it's faster than a file transfer ;-)

On the OMF thing, RADAR 24 won't support OMF but the next major release of software, 3.1, will include Broadcast Wave import/export via DVD-RAM. AES-31 play list support will follow shortly thereafter. This will allow a RADAR 24 project to go back and forth between DAW's etc. with the play list intact. File import/export and transfer via Ethernet is also on the way.

Many exciting products and features are coming! Thanks for this opportunity to introduce iZ and myself.

Happy tracking!

Ang1970 Sun, 03/11/2001 - 18:53

Welcome to RO Robin. :)

Ok, let me see if I get this straight...
Once AES31 playlist support is implemented, I will be able to slap a dvd burner to the back of the Radar, convert and dump the session to dvd, then walk into any PT5.1 room and restore to a local HD? If this is the idea, what would be a ballpark estimated time for converting and burning, let's say, one six minute song at 48kHz, 24bit, 24 tracks?

(Hope I haven't turned you off on your first visit here, hehe. We needz to git down to bizniz dough! We made it so hot in here for Soundscape that they ran off and sold their parent company to Makee! ;) )

anonymous Mon, 03/12/2001 - 05:43

Hey guys,

Its a pleasure to be here and share our vision for audio with everyone. :)

Angelo,

You've got it about right, export to dvd-ram (type II) and it will be read by DVD-ROM on your mac.

Ever since digital has come into being, there has been a lack of compatibility, but AES-31 is here to cure us from all our incompatibility disease. Our goal is that eventually, you can take a project from anywhere and load it into anything else, no problem. Hopefully Pro-Tools will support AES-31 in the near future.

iZ cares about our customers, and wants to serve them and their needs as musicians, engineers, producers etc. We have a commitment to INCREDIBLE sound quality (and yes RADAR 24 sounds even better than RADAR II) but also to our customers.

Part of that commitment is 24 hour/7day a week phone support. To our knowledge we are the ONLY pro audio company to offer 24/7 support with a real person listening and responding to your issues!

I know I'm rambling on, but you'll have to forgive me as I want to simply state where we're coming from and who we are considering we are a new company (new company=new thinking!)

Cheers,
Paul Dirks
Assistant Support Manager http://www.recordingtheworld.com

Ang1970 Mon, 03/12/2001 - 13:20

Thanks Paul, and welcome aboard! :)

The AES31 thing has been due for a long time now. Finally a standard! I doubt Digi will have any choice but to implement it if they want to stay competetive. But Digi's a strange company. Nevermind, I'm getting sidetracked... That's another can of worms.

I'd still like to know how long it will take to convert and backup a 6 minute song. Likely to be longer than dumping via either lightpipe or aes?

anonymous Tue, 04/10/2001 - 16:53

Hi guys,
well I, being completely new here, but RADAR user since number 1 - and now we have a RII and a R24 in our studio A and a PT set in studio B, would like to know if this broadcast wave export function will work only with DVD. Since we don't use the DVD backup option but a Mammoth drive instead, I would prefer to make a copy of a project, convert it to broadcast wave (or is this going to be a native recording mode?) and then save it to an extra removable hard disk , which I can take to my Mac, do my PT edits and then bring it back to RADAR...

Can we expect something like thiZ in a nearfuture version (3.1 perhaps)???

regards,
deFrenz