At the show today, Alesis told me today a couple of other interesting points about this unit.
1. It will ship "in the spring of 2001" (shooting for April). They said "Alesis" did not end in "ie", but ended in "is", therefore you could believe their shipping date.
2. These things can use the cheap 5400 RPM IDE drives, and don't require the 7200RPM. They use a proprietary method of reading and writing to drives to get 24 tracks out such a drive.
3. There is an ethernet connection in the back of the unit that will allow an FTP transfer of the files in either WAV or AIFF format, although they are not natively in either format.
4. Yep: 24 BALANCED +4 analog ins and outs (TRS) plus 3 pairs of lightpipe; word clock on BNC, and of course, ADAT sync in/out.
5. TWO drive bays in the front. You can make a backup from one drive to the other.
However, no provision for a VGA monitor...like some other products by companies that end with an "ie"...
The soon-to-be-released Tascam 32-input digital board might be a good companion to this unit?
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LW