Digidesign Session 8 setup

[Bolle]

I picked up a digidesign recording setup today containing of:

-PowerMac 8100/100 AV

-Digidesign Session 8 I/O NuBus card

-Digidesign 882-I/O interface (8 stereo In, 8 stereo Out - both analog + SPDIF in and out)

-all cables you need to set this stuff up

The Mac is in great condition. no yellowing. It did spend its while life in a recording studio. The 882 looks nice too and all cables (still worth a lot of $$$ these days) look pretty good too.

I did only test everything roughly. works like a charm.

all ins and outs on the 882 are in working order. The SCSI interface on the session 8 card works as well.

The 8100 is going to be my recording setup in the future with Audiomedia 2, (for quick recordings and maybe for audio output to amplified speakers ) ATTO SE IV (for fast SCSI drives) and the Session 8 with 882 connected for multitrack recording.

some pics:

session 8 nubus card + 882 interface




882




8100+882




test setup

http://flickr.com/photos/bolle_mac/2498907947/sizes/l/

882 front




I got all this for 17 bucks from ebay. quite a good price for stuff like that

heh and BTW... this looks like a good setup to do something useful with for the next retrochallenge

 

[paws]

It's funny, I've got absolutely no interest in the modern Digidesign systems, but I'd love something liek this..

 

[Bolle]

yea... and on top of that no normal human beeing has the $$$ to buy the new stuff.

and this old stuff from the mid 90s was the best you could get back then and it doesnt sound worse now because its like 15 years old

its still awesome quality for home/hobby recording.

and if there is the need for faster hardware i can always get a PCI core card and connect the 882 to this.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have one of those 882 cards in my collection, you are missing that special cable that goes to the 50 pin internal SCSI port on the card and then out the hole to an external SCSI drive for storing the audio you captured. I guess you can just connect it to an internal drive if you have the space.

I have a 442 setup in one of my AVID systems with a rackmount VSD box (for sync) and an external blackburst to drive that (nothing like multiple boxes with LEDs all lit up).

You got a great deal for $17.. how bad was the shipping or was it local pickup?

 

[Bolle]

it was local pickup and i´ve got the 50 pin cable its just not on the photos

 

[bigD]

Sweet score!

 

[Unknown_K]

Cool, did you get legit software and manuals as well?

 

[Bunsen]

Seven. Teen. Bucks. 8-o

Utterly jealous.

On the speed front, you could always whack a G3 in there. The 80MHz 8100 has the fast 40MHz bus that syncs nicely with the 20MHz (?) Nubus, which is why a lot of studios preferred them to the nominally-faster 110MHz models. And it runs a G3 upgrade as fast as humanly possible

Cool, did you get legit software and manuals as well?

If not, you can run PT Free on there.

 

[Bolle]

there is some software on there...

sounddesigner II runs, Logic Audio 3.4 wants teh ADB dongle (I think theres a fix for that out there ) and PT3.4 free is on there and runs

@U_K the 442 is nice too. I would love to have one as well for XLR inputs

 

[Bunsen]

I have one I'm not using

 

[Bolle]

hmmm... i got a problem now.

recording with SDII works fine to any volume i like but recording with protools 3.4 doesnt work. I always get a "improved macintosh file system not supported by protools - please update" error. Im not using HFS+ so whats the problem here?

I also tried pro tools 4 but the same error here.

And how can one format the drives connected to the I/O card?

 

[Unknown_K]

Did you use a 3rd party formatting utility for the HDs?

I have yet to get an 882 or 888 for my other card to see how it works. I would think Digidesign might have had a special HD formatting utility for the Audio drive connected to its SCSI port.

 

[Bolle]

i formatted the drive with apples disk setup.

it must be a problem with the DAE extensions because the same thing happens in logic audio. so its not protools related. strange thing is that it works with SD2.

I tried reformatting the drive and i tried 3 different Harddrives at all and they all give the same error. I couldnt find any info on a digidesign formatting utility but I also thought it may be this way that they have their own formatting util. hmmmm...

EDIT: I installed system 7.6 to see if that changes anything btu now it gives me DAE error -7 when trying to record. looking up this error told me taht the solution for it is to format the I/O drive with HFS+...

Im going to try this tomorrow - with OS9.1 again of course

 

[Bunsen]

I'd be reluctant to upgrade the OS at all on a working Digidesign setup, at least without a metric heckload of research. The Digi INITs are notoriously finicky about compatibility between OS versions, ditto hardware. Happily, Digidesign has some good documentation on this on their site.

 

[Bolle]

the digi init stuff is relatively easy. the only option I got is the init version 3.1.1 because everything older wont work with protools 3.4 and 4 and logic audio. anything newer wont work because there is no nubus support anymore in later versions.

luckily there are no invisible authorization files on the harddrive as with the avid stuff

 

[Torbar]

Do you know if you can record 8 tracks at the same time?

 

[Bolle]

you can. tahts what it was designed for and thats why teh project nubus card has its own SCSI controller and can only record to drives that are connected to the card to bypass teh slow nubus.

still getting errors when trying to record with protools or logic. "cant allocate space for recording" is the error now

EDIT: problem solved!

so lets just use common sense. the session 8 came out in 1995. The HDD i connected to it was 8.7GB... and thats where the problem lies formatted it to 2x4GB and it works like a charm now. records and plays 8 stereo tracks at once just fine.

 

[Torbar]

Nice, something like that may be what I'm looking for(want to record multiple tracks of instruments at the same time but can't afford a new multitrack recorder.)