You Must Buy An Apogee Big Ben!!!!!!!

[emluper]

I am not kidding! If you own a Venue and do not have a Big Ben. GET ONE NOW! I have always thought that the Venue was a great sounding console by itself, but you have got to HEAR this thing!! I repeat, YOU HAVE GOT TO HEAR THIS THING!!!!!!!!


Erik

[eytan]

I am not kidding! If you own a Venue and do not have a Big Ben. GET ONE NOW! I have always thought that the Venue was a great sounding console by itself, but you have got to HEAR this thing!! I repeat, YOU HAVE GOT TO HEAR THIS THING!!!!!!!!


Erik

Erik,

Sorry, if my question sounds out of place, I'm not a digital person.

What does it do? How do you use it? Where is it in the signal chain?

[CanadaMusic]

It is a digital clocking source (192khz master word clock). A better word clock allows for reductions in a digital problem labeled "jitter". The Big Ben greatly reduces this problem and also allows for digital format conversion in real time (ex. SPDIF to AES etc...)
If you are not a digital guy, then this may all seem foreign but it relates to sync'ing digital devices.

[emluper]

Like I said before, I believe that the Venue is the best sounding digital console out there. Digi has a lot of years of experience under their belt regarding making digital sound "right" and my hat is off to Sheldon, Matt and the entire design team, I am truly impressed completely recommend the console to all I speak with and am a loyal devotee. We bought the Big Ben for our studio, hooked to the Venue on a lark, and freaked out! We now have to buy a second one for the studio because Darth and the rest of the sound team won't let the first one go! It just hooks up to the Word Clock In on the FOH rack, and away you go, even more amazing sound out of the Venue.

Erik

[Matt K.]

What other sources/processors are you synching to?

[Matt_G]

Like I said before, I believe that the Venue is the best sounding digital console out there. Digi has a lot of years of experience under their belt regarding making digital sound "right" and my hat is off to Sheldon, Matt and the entire design team, I am truly impressed completely recommend the console to all I speak with and am a loyal devotee. We bought the Big Ben for our studio, hooked to the Venue on a lark, and freaked out! We now have to buy a second one for the studio because Darth and the rest of the sound team won't let the first one go! It just hooks up to the Word Clock In on the FOH rack, and away you go, even more amazing sound out of the Venue.

Erik

Actually if Digidesign had of invested more money into getting their converters right, then there would be no sonic benefits for using an external clock (although the interface prices would be a lot higher). The apogee big ben is nothing special, it just supplies your Venue with a lower jitter clock. It's not 'magic', if you hooked up any of the good brand name converters as a master clock to your Venue, you would get equally as good if not better results then Big Ben. Products from Lavry, dCs, Cranesong, Benchmark or Mytek will all do a much better job then Digidesign's internal clock. It's the same reason why my HD192 digital I/O is word clocked externally from a Cranesong HEDD.

Matt

[emluper]

In response to Matt K., everything digital that has a word clock in, CD recorders, video decks, etc.

In response to Matt G., I agree that their are a lot of great converters out there, and we could spend years extolling the virtues of each manufacturer's clocking scheme. As for the amount that Digi spends on their converters.... Well, that too could be debated from a marketing/price standpoint alone. The dB Technologies converters are great, but if you were to put 64 to 72 channels of those converters on a desk, no one would buy it. It would be way too expensive, my point was to let Venue users (I am not too sure how many of them would even think about using an external clock) know about the sonic improvement it made to a console that already sounds great right out of the box. I'll have to give the HEDD a look, I know that Crane Song has always made great products, and we use the Phoenix quite extensively.

Erik