Digital Sound Systems

[geckofx]

Hard Disk Recorder

All you need, and can get for a reasonable price is a hard disk drive recorder. They generally come with 24 channels and if you get a used one you can get it for a totally decent price. Toss the output to the amps, and you'll be rockin and rollin in no time.

[bhays]

All you need, and can get for a reasonable price is a hard disk drive recorder. They generally come with 24 channels and if you get a used one you can get it for a totally decent price. Toss the output to the amps, and you'll be rockin and rollin in no time.

Can you give me any brand/model names to get me started on the search?

[beardedbil]

Yes i would like to hear more about this also, are hard disk recorder is just to general to narrow it down on Google...

[geckofx]

HDD Recorder

Alright lets throw some product names out there then, and I'll give you rough prices if the items were new.

Fostex D2424LV - $1000-$1500

Mackie HDR - $2500ish
Mackie MDR
Mackie SDR

Now a place I used to work for used the Fostex because we were looking for something new and the lower end Mackie are no longer made. Worked great and that was well within the price range we were looking for.

However if you are shooting lower than that here is the skinny on the Mackie's. Originally their line had three models. The SDR, MDR, and HDR. The SDR was the cheapest then the MDR and HDR respectively. For whatever reason they canceled the SDR and MDR units and now only offer the HDR. The HDR is WAY more unit than you need. Actually the MDR is way more than you need, the SDR would suite you perfectly for your application and is also the cheapest. I just checked and they are floating around on ebay for a decent price.

I don't know how fancy you are looking to go with this but I have some other suggestions if you want to push this as far as it can go.

The philosophy behind this kind of equipment is that while it is a high cost up front purchase, it is very simple to operate once you have it setup, literally push play, turn on the amps and you're rolling, and it will last the life of your haunt as long as you take care of it.


Freddie

[bhays]

The philosophy behind this kind of equipment is that while it is a high cost up front purchase, it is very simple to operate once you have it setup, literally push play, turn on the amps and you're rolling, and it will last the life of your haunt as long as you take care of it.
Freddie

Does it loop the sound files easily? In many cases you have a 2 or 3 minute audio file you want to repeat all night...I just wouldn't want to get into a situation where it took 20 minutes of opening files, hitting play and repeat x 24 channels to get sound going that night.

I am just curious what level of complexity is involved vs something like the binloop that you just hit one button on. Or, albeit a hardware cluster, the Delta cards and Winamp with a batch file that loads all the players when windows boots.

[beardedbil]

Here is a link to the manual for the Mackie SDR 24/96 for anyone who is interested...

http://mackie.com/pdf/sdr2496_og.pdf

[robos99]

Does it loop the sound files easily? In many cases you have a 2 or 3 minute audio file you want to repeat all night...I just wouldn't want to get into a situation where it took 20 minutes of opening files, hitting play and repeat x 24 channels to get sound going that night.

A HDD based recorder is not what you're looking for in this case. HDD recorders are intended for a continuous multi track (or channel) recording. So this will go from beginning to end, on all 24 tracks at the same time. You might be able to get it to loop, but all tracks will loop at the same time, not separately. Further, you can't have a closed contact trigger fire off the tracks either.

I have one of the Mackie HDD recorders (not sure which model, it was the cheaper one) and it's quite a nice machine, but would not do what you're looking to do. You'd have to load all your sound files into a sound editing program, loop them all internally to the desired length, send them out to separate wave files, and then load each wave file onto the machine.


Aren't there any manufacturers that make audio products geared specifically towards haunts? Or perhaps people that can put together audio products intended for something else and package them in a manner useful to haunts?

[bhays]

Aren't there any manufacturers that make audio products geared specifically towards haunts? Or perhaps people that can put together audio products intended for something else and package them in a manner useful to haunts?

There seem to be a lot of people making individual digital sound units for prop sound, etc. but not a centralized unit such as I am looking for. The Alcorn McBride Binloop system is ideal, but it's targeted at the theme park/amusement industry and priced accordingly.

[robos99]

There seem to be a lot of people making individual digital sound units for prop sound, etc. but not a centralized unit such as I am looking for. The Alcorn McBride Binloop system is ideal, but it's targeted at the theme park/amusement industry and priced accordingly.

Yes, I'll agree that the binloop is way too expensive for most to use. Same goes for their line of show controllers. Excellent products but definetly not meant for the budget minded.


On the issue of centralized units, do you think there would be a market for such a thing? I'm a bit of an audio expert and right now only dabble in the haunt industry as a hobby, but I'd certainly be interested in developing audio solutions targeted at haunts if there was a market for it.

And if such a thing were to be made, what do you think people would want out of a centralized audio system?

[geckofx]

HDD Recorder

Actually you don't need to drag it into a sound editor. Granted I do this now because we mess with every audio file we use, but back when I first started this gig I used a CD player to record each track onto the recorder.

Here is the skinny.

The setup on the HDD Recorder is where the money is, it takes some time, but once everything is dialed in you turn it on, hit play and away your audio goes. We setup a 30min loop on ours. Each of tracks varies between 30sec to 10min. If you use winamp on your computer as the source for recording the reset time between loops is instantaneous, so you get no break in the audio on a given track. We record each track for 30min and presto, you're done. You will have a discontinuity in the tracks once every 30min, you could push this longer is you so choose. Our haunt is roughly a 20min walk through which means the customers will at most catch one point where is sounds like the audio skips.

We don't look at our audio as number of tracks, instead we approach it as the number of channels. Each channel can have a singe speaker, or an array of speakers. A HDD Recorder gives you 24 channels of audio. It is totally possible for several of the channels to be identical, and using the spiffy copy and paste features on the recorder you can have the channels lines up exactly. This way if you have a larger area where you want say 8 speakers all playing the same audio you could simple run 2 channels each with 4 speakers in series, or 4 channels with 2 speakers in series.

So if you take those 24 channels and power them using inexpensive home theater stereos. Best Buy sells a 5ch Insignia for $150 you could easily power 96 speakers in your haunt for right around $2000 and that is with all new equipment.

No this system does not allow for small loop triggering as per props. There are a number of audio units out there that serve this exact purpose. Most of the major vendors sell a triggered audio unit with their props for a little extra. And some controllers come with audio units built in. We have not been particularly thrilled with the quality of audio coming from the triggered units. And the units that do offer near 44.1khz PCM quality are so expensive it seems like a waste. What we have been using lately is a CD player hooked up through and octal base relay that the props controller will trigger. This gives us two advantages. One we get the high quality audio coming from a cd player. Two we can split the left and the right channel and have an ambient sound for when the prop is not triggered, and a separate sound for when the prop goes off. The main downside to this approach is that the CD player is continuously playing and the sound kicks in and out randomly through the tracks. That is to say that there isn't a given start and end point for the sound. A little creativity when arranging your audio tracks gets past this however. We have a great setup using this system with some transformers we made, and a Unit 70 Crawler.

I probably should just write an article about all this crap with diagrams and examples. What do yall think, would Larry be interested?

Freddie

[robos99]

You're correct, you don't need an audio editor to use HDD based recorders...I was thinking along the lines of the way I usually do it. The problem is you can't have 24 channels loop independantly. As you stated, you have a workaround for that, but to me that sounds like it's more trouble than it's worth.

If I were just playing background tracks all of the same length, then this would be great for that. But if you have 24 channels of audio, all of the same length, getting them to all loop together and seamlessly would be a real pain.

You mentioned the audio quality from the triggered units is suspect. Is this quality bad because of the design of the playback device or could it be something else in the signal chain? I'm used to working with large scale PA systems for rock concerts, so at any point there could be a dozen different things contributing noise to a system. Could it be that the connectors used on these are sub par?

But moreso, just how important is true cd quality audio in a haunt? I can see how a high quality, 5.1 digital surround setup could create some really cool effects, but is this really important to anyone? Does audio play a huge role in your haunts? (that's directed to anyone out there). I see a lot of mention of acting, and props, but not a whole lot on the subject of audio, aside from this thread. Just some things I was pondering as I wrote this.

[bhays]

But moreso, just how important is true cd quality audio in a haunt? I can see how a high quality, 5.1 digital surround setup could create some really cool effects, but is this really important to anyone? Does audio play a huge role in your haunts? (that's directed to anyone out there). I see a lot of mention of acting, and props, but not a whole lot on the subject of audio, aside from this thread. Just some things I was pondering as I wrote this.

I don't know about cd quality, but decent quality sound makes a tremendous difference to me. That's why I am upgrading our sound system this off season. We have been using various crappy Wal-Mart stereos, etc. for the past seven years and when I go to a Haunt like Industrial Nightmare where good quality PA amps and speakers are used, it creates a completely different experience.

[actiondeath]

Has anyone tried a PC with multiple sound cards. Sounds like that is basically what the HDD unit is. I've never tried multiple sound cards in a single PC, but I have used multiple video cards and capture cards, so I would think multiple sound cards are possible. Most PC sound cards are not too expensive, but for this application, they would need to be equipped with internal amplification (unless your haunt speakers are amplified).

Also, it's been a while since I have used WinAmp. I know you used to be able to run multiple instances at once, but I don't know if you can configure each instance independently (one instance playback on sound card #1, another instance playback on sound card #2, etc.) If Winamp can't do it, I wonder if another program could.

One limitation I can see off the bat is that most consumer boards only have about 4 to 6 PCI slots, so you'd be limited to that many channels (or 8 to 12 if you have an audio editor and you want to run mono).

A little work in initial setup, but after that, I think it would be pretty smooth once you have it down. I may try that sometime unless someone else has and it can't be done. Does it make sense?

[robos99]

Has anyone tried a PC with multiple sound cards. Sounds like that is basically what the HDD unit is. I've never tried multiple sound cards in a single PC, but I have used multiple video cards and capture cards, so I would think multiple sound cards are possible. Most PC sound cards are not too expensive, but for this application, they would need to be equipped with internal amplification (unless your haunt speakers are amplified).

I beleive this idea was discussed earlier in the thread.

Basically a HDD type recorder could be boiled down to just a computer with multiple sound cards...but it's packaged much nicer. It's usually standalone, so you don't need a computer. And some have advanced editing functions built into them. It's not far off from computer based recording.

I don't think I've ever seen PC sound cards with internal amplification. If they did, I would think the quality would be suspect, not to mention you won't get a lot of power out of them. What you really want to do is run the signal from those sound cards (or any other playback device) into a power amp or stereo receiver, and run your speakers from there. This is the signal chain in it's most basic version. I'm intentionally leaving out anything like mixers, mics (for annoucements or emergency messages), and signal processing like EQ and such.

[actiondeath]

Gotcha. I must've missed that. I was thinking with internally amp'd soundcards you could bypass the big amps. It would be more self-contained that way. To power each channel externally, you would need a separate amp for each pair of channels (unless you had a distribution amp with multiple independent I/O). I suppose that would still beat having 12 home stereo systems running, but I was trying to thin it down a bit more.

I had an HP Pavilion a while back with internal amplification, so I know they exist (or at least they did). I believe it was 10 watts, which wouldn't be terrible for a haunt application if you are using the right speakers.