Thunderbolt Hard Drive/UA Apollo

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roscoenyc
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Thunderbolt Hard Drive/UA Apollo

Post by roscoenyc » Wed Nov 14, 2012 7:27 am

Anybody using a Thunderbolt hard drive?
Recently acquired a UA Apollo quad w the Thunderbolt card for my home rig.

Looking for recomendations on a hard drive.

Also SSD vs 7200 rpm?
Last edited by roscoenyc on Thu Mar 28, 2013 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Thunderbolt Hard Drive?

Post by Nick Sevilla » Wed Nov 14, 2012 8:45 am

roscoenyc wrote:Anybody using a Thunderbolt hard drive?
Recently acquired a UA Apollo quad w the Thunderbolt card for my home rig.

Looking for recomendations on a hard drive.

Also SSD vs 7200 rpm?
I've been using Seagate Raptor 10K rpm drives as my main audio drives. SATA, so they might be able to work with a ThunderPuss enclosure.

SSD - no way. Too volatile for our needs. Their useablity (times readXwrite) is still too low for heavy duty use.

Plus, I still like to know SOMETHING is spinning in a circle when making music. I'm not ready to completely get rid of that comforting thought.

Cheers
Howling at the neighbors. Hoping they have more mic cables.

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Post by abograpes » Mon Nov 19, 2012 11:05 am

We've been using the Buffalo 1TB Thunderbolt drive I got from B&H when tb drives first came out. It's worked great so far.

I had never heard of Buffalo, but it was the cheapest at the time ($200), had good reviews, and it was the only one I saw made in Japan.

Only downside is the cable it comes with is literally like 18" long.

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Post by TimOBrien » Wed Nov 21, 2012 11:58 am

You dont really need to put drives on the tbolt chain.

7200rpm fw400 drives can stream over 100 tracks, fw800 twice that.

Any theoretical advantages you gain would never be used unless you're dong massive orchestrations.

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Post by roscoenyc » Thu Dec 20, 2012 1:20 pm

I did end up getting a Lacie Little Big Disk t-bolt drive.
It's loud as hell.

It's going back.

The Apollo Quad, on the other hand, is a monster helper here at home!

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Post by johnny7 » Wed Mar 27, 2013 12:55 pm

Roscoe- If you don't mind me asking, what are your thought on the Apollo after using it for a while?

Thanks,

Johnny7

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Post by roscoenyc » Thu Mar 28, 2013 6:50 am

johnny7 wrote:Roscoe- If you don't mind me asking, what are your thought on the Apollo after using it for a while?

Thanks,

Johnny7
I don't have enough words to say how well the Apollo has performed for me.
Mic Pre's sound very good.
The sound of the converters and clock was immediate. Just so much better than what I was used to hearing at home (w the older Firewire M-Box Pro-2)

I dont' know anybody who doesn't like the available plugs, especially if you came up in the analog years using the kind of outboard gear that they offer. The plugs are that good and they work just like the analog gear in my studio. I'm a known non fan of reverb in general but I've been waiting since 1986 to get my hands on an EMT250. I could love this box for that alone. A lot of the plugs have different engineer/producer presets that you can check out as starting places. Guys I know and have worked with.

Then there is the Apollo Console.
It really functions like a 'console'
At home I have mic plugged in and a guitar amp sim plugged in.
They are always there. I usually mute the track in Protools and listen through the console when I'm overdubbing at home. There is no perceptable latency this way.
The console allows you to build 2 independent headphone mixes.
It also lets you apply plugins on the record side, for instance a little bit of LA-2 on a vocal on the way in. I'm not aware of any DAW that lets you do this.
You have the choice of printing that compression or just monitoring through it.
The console also has a couple effects sends so you can give a guy some reverb or slap when he's doing a vocal.

I bought the Quad processor and the Thunderbolt card. I've done a couple full album mix projects here at home so far and the bands were very happy. I haven't been able to overload the processors so far. I also got the thumbs up from my mastering guy too.

For me at home it really is 'that good'.

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Post by johnny7 » Thu Mar 28, 2013 8:39 am

Thank you for the feedback.
You just pushed me over the edge... :D

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Post by roscoenyc » Sat Mar 30, 2013 7:04 am

I bet you'll like it. Go for the quad if you can.

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Post by ott0bot » Sat Mar 30, 2013 8:25 am

I've been pondering a gear "reset" for my home rig, part of it switching over to an Apollo. My main concern is the conversion quality compared to the Lynx Aurora I currently have. I've heard all sorts of comments about it lacking compared to Lynx? Metric Halo, etc...but sometimes I fell like most people have no real factual basis to thier conplaints about the conversion quality.

any way you could shed some light on the Apollo vs what you used at you studio?

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Post by Nick Sevilla » Sat Mar 30, 2013 8:36 am

ott0bot wrote:I've been pondering a gear "reset" for my home rig, part of it switching over to an Apollo. My main concern is the conversion quality compared to the Lynx Aurora I currently have. I've heard all sorts of comments about it lacking compared to Lynx? Metric Halo, etc...but sometimes I fell like most people have no real factual basis to thier conplaints about the conversion quality.

any way you could shed some light on the Apollo vs what you used at you studio?
You are correct there. "They", and "Those People" like to just bash stuff because they are jealous someone else owns it, and have mostly never even seen one up close.

Cheers
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Post by roscoenyc » Sat Mar 30, 2013 11:41 am

ott0bot wrote:I've been pondering a gear "reset" for my home rig, part of it switching over to an Apollo. My main concern is the conversion quality compared to the Lynx Aurora I currently have. I've heard all sorts of comments about it lacking compared to Lynx? Metric Halo, etc...but sometimes I fell like most people have no real factual basis to thier conplaints about the conversion quality.

any way you could shed some light on the Apollo vs what you used at you studio?
I haven't brought the Apollo in to our studio to compare but I really like how the 96k stuff sounds on it. At CTS we have 192's and the 2 Channel Burl B-2 Bomber (& the Calrec Console). The B-2 is really something. Without getting scientific about it I can say that I feel I don't have to make any excuses for stuff that I do at home w the Apollo. It's different and very pleasing and to me the plugs are a big part of the equation.

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Post by ott0bot » Sat Mar 30, 2013 1:08 pm

roscoenyc wrote:
ott0bot wrote:I've been pondering a gear "reset" for my home rig, part of it switching over to an Apollo. My main concern is the conversion quality compared to the Lynx Aurora I currently have. I've heard all sorts of comments about it lacking compared to Lynx? Metric Halo, etc...but sometimes I fell like most people have no real factual basis to thier conplaints about the conversion quality.

any way you could shed some light on the Apollo vs what you used at you studio?
I haven't brought the Apollo in to our studio to compare but I really like how the 96k stuff sounds on it. At CTS we have 192's and the 2 Channel Burl B-2 Bomber (& the Calrec Console). The B-2 is really something. Without getting scientific about it I can say that I feel I don't have to make any excuses for stuff that I do at home w the Apollo. It's different and very pleasing and to me the plugs are a big part of the equation.
cool. thanks for the feedback. the main thing is I can push the Lynx to -1 or even 0 without any negative digital artifacts or significant change is signal quality. howere with the 003r...it's it's not under -6 I can hear crap falling apart. I want to make sure it's not a temperamental little brat that makes me have to babysit the signal.

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Post by joel hamilton » Sat Jun 22, 2013 12:27 pm

The apollo rules. I use the UAD stuff constantly. (full disclosure, I have an artist deal with them)... but I loved the stuff before I got a deal on it!

Here is the big thing I have figured out with drives... after running my own server for quite a while now, and developing the kit needed to keep it up and running CONSTANTLY with many many clients and engineers relying on it in a multi room facility, and for remote mixing clients and streaming mixes and so on....

The best drives I have are either mirrored RAID, (RAID1 ), or enterprise grade drives.

Putting a toshiba enterprise grade drive in an enclosure or in a mac pro has changed the way my protools rig works... Having a mirrored RAID for a system drive has made my protools rig Air-traffic-control stable! Printing to enterprise grade drives is simply amazing. They are made to be on, all the time, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. They are made to stream data, and to read and write with as few bad sectors as possible, and they recover from bumping into a bad sector like 1000 times faster and better than consumer grade drives.

If you can swing it, just put an enterprise grade drive in a good enclosure like an OWC mercury pro.

Now as far as T-bolt goes, you can just use a T-bolt to FW800 adaptor for the moment, until the world catches up and the drives are available.

I am suprised more people are not hip to the enterprise grade drive thing. It only came from me being the Admin/tech of my own server setup.

Hope you are well, Roscoe! Lets hang sometime! Black swan? :)

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