At 16:34 24-10-03, Ben Kennedy wrote:
By far the cheapest device I've seen is the Griffin iMic... it's got a pair of stereo minijacks (one for in and one for out) and connects by USB. It's what I was using for too long before getting the "real" equipment. :) I haven't tried, but I imagine you could probably plug several of these babies into your computer if you had enough USB ports.
Eeek! But I suppose it might work :)
Of course, the output quality is lesser (and input quality sucked, I kept having problems with noise and weird clipping and stuff, but I began to conclude it was crappy USB audio drivers in Mac OS X), and they only support 44.1khz at 20-bit.
According to Griffin's website, many USB hubs suck at audio and so they've made an audio oriented audio USB hub. So I suppose I could buy their hub and 4 iMics :) though that still stacks up to something like USD 175. And it's not clear to me how I would be sure which channel was going to which iMic output :) Looks like this sort of tech requires a modestly hefty cash outlay .... I did scrounged up this relatively new thingy for FireWire: http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2003/FireWire-410-Shipping.html which looks a bit cheaper than the 828mk2 (USD 500), and does fewer things, but looks like it fits the bill for knocking a Firewire output into 8 analog line outputs. Still out of my price range, but, you know, some day ..... :) Cheers, Carl -- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com http://www.carlaz.com/