Philip Perkins

I gotta say that for a moke like me, who gets steaming piles of very problematic semi-pro-or-newbie-recorded hard-doc verite production sound to work over and make broad-or stream-castable (re: tech eval), Clear is the bomb. Yeah, I know that AI will take over all this sort of work very soon, but until it does.....

Clear is a great plugin, very worth the $ . You get a lot of good re-reverb and denoise really fast with it.

It's worth a shot trying to get them to work yourself if the machines were not abused or run into the ground back in the day. Then you'd at least have the basis of a conversation with a DAT tech if you find one.

The electronics are almost never the issue with DATs. It's their poorly designed and manufactured transports that cause nearly all issues. The transport consists of a great many small parts, motors and sensors and relies very much on the tape being at the correct (high) tension for the thing to work at all. This is one reason that DATs didn't wear very well.

Ironically, it is much harder (if not impossible) to get DATs repaired (especially portable units) than it is to get even a very old Nagra (like III) worked on these days. Nagras give some kind of pleasure to techs working on them, like old cars etc. DATs are just a terrible pain in the ass. If your DATs really were working ok when you stopped using them and were stored under reasonable circumstances then it would be worth trying to gently get the transports running again by cleaning the heads and the guides and then putting some sacrificable tapes in them and trying to get them to lace up and run at play speed. Do the machines run well enough to give you a BLER count? The issues with DATs are almost always the transport and heads (as in clogged) vs the electronics...

Like I said: "Behringered".

The mic in question, 4099 in mounts for double bass and cello and occasionally piano, has worked very well when it works. It's a bit fragile but players like it. (They are also popular for car-dialog rigs too.) But a co. that doesn't service expensive pro gear doesn't get any more biz from me.

I've had no or very slow and non-specific response from DPA re: service for a mic that is out of warranty. I also tried a few audio techs for repair and they had no better luck with DPA than I did. Am done with DPA.

Goyo will go EOL on Dec. 1. It was working well here but I'm working on a doc feature the mix for which will go well beyond Dec 1, so I got "Clear", the paid-for version. It currently doesn't work properly within Reaper without some workarounds, but seemed ok in other DAWs incl. PT. It's pretty helpful, more for DX reverb than BG noise, but its very fast to use. You can push it too hard and make it sound bad, and it follows "Berger's Law" just as much as any other NR plugin or device (works best when you need it the least).

Please leave our little morsel alone....

Around here no one wants my cables and the latency is liveable.

Once the local videoists went to QTake all video became wireless. Teradek on cams, wireless to monitors. We don't hook them up for sound anymore, they take the wireless hop audio from the camera Teradeks.

A mixer that is also the recorder needs TC to function in our world. See Sound Devices, Zaxcom, Aaton, Yamaha DM7, etc etc.

Nicely done! Very clean and functional.

My FOH friends agree, in that they all hate the TF mixers, and find the DM3 stage interesting. I looked long and hard at it and decided it was not enough of what I need (inputs, faders, recording, timecode) and a lot of what I don't need (most of the FX etc). That it has Dante from the get go is very cool. But it is not any sort of DM7, which is reflected in the price. Maybe a future firmware upgrade will allow the DM3 to accept more inputs to mix (via Dante), that would be great.

The 664+552 is a nice combo if you set it up right (prefade iso outs, link i/o mix buses). But no linear faders like CL12. CL6 worked well but you had to keep in mind the way that the operation of the 2nd group of 6 channels differed from the operation of the 664's chan 1-6. OK but annoying. In my later life I really missed having mic pres on Ch 7-12, hence the 552 (+a 12th outboard pre when needed) vs the CL6 which is line level input only.

CL16?

What devices are you speaking of re: +/-26ppm? Consoles? Preamps? Stage boxes?

For me--just the first level: I got lost pretty quickly in the 2nd tier. But the first level seems to contain most of what a humble location soundie needs to know. Now that I know I can make a basic system work in the shop, my fear of course is what would I do if I could not get something to connect out on a real job. The other bugaboo, which has been discussed here by people with real Dante experience, is dealing with issues caused by other people's networks (as in trying to patch into a live-sound rig).

Because I come from the Age of Analog, I needed to convince myself that a Dante based recording system would indeed hold sync to the degree needed for location dialog (etc) recording. After being told it would by a friendly tech @ Audinate, I set out to prove it to myself. A mic pointed at a radio with a talky station on, the pre output split between my 744T (which has been an extremely reliable source of WC and TC for my rigs for decades now) and an Audinate AVIO 2-input Dante adapter, then a switch, then an ethernet to USB A adapter, then into a quite elderly Mac laptop running DVS and Reaper. 3.5 hrs--dead sync all the way. No external clock on the Dante side at all. I realize this isn't news to a whole lot of you folks, but I was very glad to be able to prove to myself that this kind of thing will work.

And no ability to cascade onto the mix bus (Link i/o).

Wingman and 664, far too unreliable for me to use on a job--much too fussy.

A brief call to Yamaha support answered a few questions mentioned above. They do not view the DM series as replacements to the CL+QL or even the TF mixers and are still making all those. The DM3 is a different beast than a DM7, not just in # of inputs--they viewed the TFs as the next step up (in inputs etc) from the DM3. I asked for clarification on the number of channels to mix on the DM3, and they said that while you can mix and match input sources, 16+2 channels to mix is all you get, period.

So in this system what is the word clock master? What drives the TC generator (making TC for BR)?

CLs and QLs are much more expensive than DMs, even used. I don't think it will replace them, but will for sure replace TFs, at least among FOH folks. I'd be interested to know what is clocking the Dante feed for this mixer when it is using Dante for inputs. Is it something that is generating TC? How are you feeding the computer running BR? Dante? USB?