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Hi! There is basically one answer only DANTE. Easy setup and up to 64 Channels. Cheers Mike
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To Dobbs Craft,

Dante is a great answer but there are other iLive options.

Dante is very full-featured. And you will need a full-featured computer (including a 64 bit OS) to take advantage of all those features. For about $900 less than the Dante, A&H offers the Mini Multi-Out card which includes three lightpipe outs. Your church could then buy a used Alesis HD24 for around $500, three lightpipe cables for $50 or so, round up some spare IDE hard drives and start recording up to 24 channels of 24 bit audio at 48k. The sound you get via the the Mini Multi-Out card should be pretty much the same as the sound you get via the Dante, only fewer channels.

If you then decide to get ambitious, sell the Mini Multi-Out card, and add a Dante card when you need more than 24 channels. To be really ambitious, you could try to hang the HD24 off the dedicated Dante computer (via a soundcard with lightpipe outs and the right chipset) to do backup recording of the most important 24.

best,

john

Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long

The first question you need to ask yourself is how many channels do you want to record?

You could just get a little recorder like a Zoom H4n and connect it to some spare outputs. That gives you 2 channels of recording. Very cheap.

For multi-tracking, we use the MMO card connected via ADAT to an Alesis HD24. Works well for us. We already had the HD24 prior to purchasing our iLive, and so we wanted an ADAT interface. There are lots of options when looking for ADAT recording devices, even though the number of options have diminished in recent times. They are typically relatively cheap.

Personally, if I was starting again, I’d get a Dante card. Records every channel onto a half-way decent computer. A little MacMini running Dante is what were planning for.

Cheers,
Michael

I’ll add to the chorus. I have an HD24 sitting on a shelf collecting dust. We use Dante for multitracking and monitor split. Dante also gives you better expandability if you want to add a monitor split someday. All that said, I’ll sell you that HD24 for $100 []

T112/Dual:iDR32-iDR48/Dante
MacBook Pro/iDR16/Dante
T112/iDR48/Dante
T112/iDR32
Mac Mini/Dante (Backing Tracks)
Mac Pro/Dante (Multitracking)
2 iPads w/ MixPad