Speaking of formats... CJ and I were sitting in the front row of Roger Nichols' AES Convention talk on mixing. He spent a lot of time going over how you need to get good quality, clean tracks. He played a variety of things, like James Taylor with Tower of Power, and soloed tracks to show how drum leakage helped... Then he was playing a session recorded in Mexico. It sounded like the others, stunning. He soloed tracks again, stunning sound. "By the way," he says, "these were recorded on two black face ADATs." Several guys in the audience nearly crapped their pants, including CJ. Then he added that the error correction notice was on full time and the heads had over 10,000 hours and he couldn't read the time displays because of all the error messages... Impressive. We couldn't believe how good it sounded.
I bring it up, because I still track to ADATs at times. It's not to be scoffed at. It's absolutely the fastest workflow (tracking, not locking up sync back and forth) and beats all the DAW BS you have to deal with. It's just like tracking to analog. Everyone can hear everything without annoying monitor issues, no latency, plenty of tracks, plenty of I/O, etc. And the converters were a breakthrough in their day and still sound good, no matter what anyone says.
It's an overlooked option, especially on a budget, and especially when you need a lot of tracks like me, 8 tracks for the kit, 3 for the organ, 3 for the guitar, 2 for the bass... when all the guys are playing at the same time you need an assistant to keep up on a DAW, there's so much clicking and routing and screen time. Man, the ADATs have saved me in many sessions. With the ubiquitous optical I/O on everything, even Macs now, it's a cynch to fly ADAT tracks into your favorite DAW. But no one uses 'em now. It's old fashioned.
I was an early PT adopter. And I left the platform because of the annoying way the company ties the HW in with the SW and makes you pay to keep up with both. PT stands for PayTools.
Man, that was a good salad. Now for the pale ale. Wife and kids are outa the house and I'm remembering how much fun it is to be in a quiet environment again. :grin: