SunRize AD516 - best soundcard ever made for the Amiga

[therail]

wot is this card like? wot can it do? i might buy one in the future!

[McVenco]

therail wrote:
wot is this card like? wot can it do? i might buy one in the future!

You don't know what the card does, but you are interested in buying one?

I confused. :roll:

[T3000]

Seaquest wrote:
I'm gonna dedicate one of my spare A3000,A4000 to
setup up a Studio16 workstation:-)

Get a SCSI II interface and HD. Will get better performance for digitizing and playback.

[Plaz]

wot is this card like? wot can it do? i might buy one in the future!

Multi-track 16 bit HD recording. It also links with midi programs like Bars&Pipes, and with it's AHI support it can work with other AHI supported programs. The more AD516's you have, the more simultaneous tracks you can record. If you have one card, you can record two mono tracks or one stereo. However with one card you can mix and play back many more tracks. I was able to mix 18 tracks using an A3000/040 25mhz with a DKB 128MB ram expansion before I stated hitting limits with HD bandwidth and CPU power. (Try that on a 1.5GHZ windows box) I eventually bought a second card to let me record 4 tracks at once. Theoretically I think you can have up to 4 cards. Greg Ham (of Men at Work fame), told me he used an A3000 with 4 cards to record the song "No Restrictions" for their Brazil album. I still have my 3000, though I'm doing most of my work on XP/Sonar these days to get all the cool new toys.

Very nice price given for this card. If I could get that much for each of my pair, I MIGHT think about selling. (not planning on it though).

BTW. The AD512 was a good card by the same company for doing mono recording. Typically they were much cheaper, but I don't see many of those around.

Plaz

[Plaz]

I'm gonna dedicate one of my spare A3000,A4000 to
setup up a Studio16 workstation

Get a SCSI II interface and HD. Will get better performance for digitizing and playback.

The native controllers in the 3000 and 4000 were always good enough for me typically using 8-16 tracks. Of course the more CPU and HD bandwidth you can get the better. :-)

Plaz

[Seaquest]

[/quote]

Get a SCSI II interface and HD. Will get better performance for digitizing and playback. [/quote]

Yes thats exactly what i had in my mind :-D

I'm gonna use this for recording my midi sequencing
from my other main A4000 :-)

ps. any tips about studio16 addon's beside those on aminet?

[Plaz]

Definitely get Bars & Pipes 2.5 (now open sourced and maintained by Alfred Faust) I assume you're getting the Studio16 software as part of the deal too correct?

Oh and duhhhhh. You can look at my very old Amiga music support page. I haven't updated it in years, but you still  might find some helpful and interesting info.

Amiga Music Access

Plaz

[Ral-Clan]

I kind of regret never buying one of these cards when they were always selling on Ebay for $80US around 2001.  The price seems to have gone up lately (like all Amiga stuff).

But the one thing that held me back was the fact you could do no EQ'ing or add effects to the recorded tracks.  (As I understand there is only one non-realtime reverb effect, and no EQ function).

Because of this, it always seemed to me like this card was designed for adding music/voiceovers to video productions, rather than recording music.  I'm not really sure how the "Men at Work" fellow mentioned above could have done music production.  Can each audio track be played via a separate audio output to an external mixer or effects unit?

At that time there were no AHI drivers for it either, so it was only useful with the Studio16 software.

Instead I purchased an external digital multitracker SYNCed to an Amiga sequencer via MIDI.  I also bought a Repulse card later on.

[Plaz]

@ral-clan

Can each audio track be played via a separate audio output to an external mixer or effects unit?

Yes, and this is one among other methods I used. With 2 cards I had 4 separate outputs. I could feed separate tracks to external rack mounted effects, then through a mackie mixer, and back to the AD516 card to record the EQ/Effected tracks either to a final stereo mix or just back to a new track(s). (Playback/Recording at the same time) Later on I started using some other tools. I would export the raw tracks, use a thrid party app to effect/cleanup the tracks, then drop it back to studio16 for final mix. I'm sure others had their own clever methods too.

At that time there were no AHI drivers for it either, so it was only useful with the Studio16 software

For HD recording, that's true. However it always supported Bars&Pipes even before AHI. I'm pretty sure there were a few other supported recordings apps too, though I can't recall them..... Opalvision?? Besides, who ever needed more than Studio16 and B&P anyway???  :-D  I bought an Alesis Adat around the same time. Studio16 kicked it's butt around the block, a couple of times.

AHI's main contribution was to allow other apps and games to use the card's sound outputs. But it's biggest advantage was to add support to ProAudioStation that that added the post production tools like EQ/Reverb.... Unfortunately I had moved over to PC based recording by the time this was available and I just couldn't afford to support both systems.

Plaz

[Plaz]

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/4753/ - Amiga Music Access

Pardon the zombie revive. While searching I ran across this old hardware thread and thought I'd update the link for any interested retro users.

Geocities went dark in 2009, but there is an archive. My old Amiga music page/info lives on at http://www.reocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/4753/

Wow, the internet in it's infancy. Many dead links, but a good place to dig up names/terms for your nearest search engine.

Plaz

[danbeaver]

I have the AD516 and AD1012, and they can even spell simple words!!