If you thought multi-track hard disk recording was only for the computer-literate, then read on. Akai's new baby the DR8 proves you can have it all, and in a tidy box. Bob Dormon lifts the lid and prods with approval...

I'll admit it, I've been working with hard disks and computers for years, so the thought of going back to pushing buttons and getting something sensible out of an LED display was not my idea of fun. Yet Akai have a knack for allowing you to do a lot with apparently very little. The DR8 is a hard disk recorder in every sense, it's just that it doesn't come with a mouse or a Star Trek screen-saver.

All the usual edit functions are there, so you can move tracks around, splice them together, copy and repeat them, and if you mess up you can even undo your last edit. With the HD version, you get 1Gb of storage (over 3 hours in total, at 48kHz), eight tracks of high quality digital audio to play with, comprehensive digital interfacing and a variety of optional interfaces to suit your recording needs.

Surprisingly, the MIDI interface card doesn't come as standard, but that may be based on sound economics. After all, if you're a classical muso, a jazzer or a folkie, MIDI may not have anything to offer you that you'd want to know about. However, one feature worth knowing about is the jog/shuttle wheel, which allows you to rock and roll back and forth around sections of audio, to get precise edit points much in the same way as you would with an open reel tape machine. There's a lot in that 4u box, and this is only the beginning...

Transport controls

By putting some of the latest technological developments into just one unit, it would appear that Akai are out to attract forward-thinking types. There are still engineers out there who don't know, and don't want to know about MIDI and computers. Their passion lies with recording live acts, and a tried and tested modus operandi. Now, the DR8 presents the opportunity to raise the stakes in terms of quality and efficiency, without sacrificing familiarity.

On the front panel are buttons with tape transport controls, which a seven year-old could work out. The rest takes a little more time. The LED readout can display absolute time, relative time and bars/beats (when set to Song mode). Overall, absolute time is perhaps the least confusing way to operate the DR8, in that you always know where you are.

The locator functions provide the means to navigate the DR8, together with the obligatory idiosyncrasies that every manufacturer adds to their autolocator's operation. You can specify 'in', and 'out', points for auto punch-in/out recording, and try them out first by using the Rehearse facility. Even if you're the kind of chap or chappess who does everything on the fly, familiarity with setting up in and out points is crucial, before delving into the DR8's more esoteric functions.

Locate points can be specified in a number of ways, the most obvious being to press the locate button and then enter in the numbers on the numeric keypad. If you want something more permanent, you can press the Store/Enter key — so that 'Memory', flashes below your current time position — and choose to store it as a Direct Locate point, by selecting 1-9 on the numeric keypad, or as an in or out point.

Alternatively, press the 'Stack' key, and you can enter the position as one of a hundred, two-digit stack-locate points. All of this stuff speeds up the recording and editing process significantly. Locators are great when you're wading through miles of tape, but because hard disk recording doesn't involve any significant cueing up time, you can work your way through a song without any delays at all. Great news if you're worried about studio time, but bad news for the engineer used to rolling a crafty fag while the tape rewinds.

Besides the typical 'tape', transport controls, the DR8 has dedicated buttons that can be programmed to play for a specific length of time before, after (or before and after) the current locate position. I didn't use them, but they could save time for single-handed operation or tricky vocal or solo parts. However, one feature I did use was the 'last', locate button. Prodding this calls up the last two points when playing, recording or winding was stopped.

Take Five

Below the locator display and chunky transport control buttons is a more intense section. The top row of buttons deals with in and out points, the repeat function (to cycle round these points), and the auto punch-in that also refers to the in/out points. In the centre lies the Edit key, the gateway to extremely powerful multitrack manipulation facilities. But more on that later.

Beneath this is another couple of rows that will charm the socks off anyone nervous about overdubbing or committing themselves to just one take. Basically, you set up a track to record, press the Reserved key in this section, and all five 'Take' LEDs flash invitingly. Choose one and record. If you're not sure about the recording but don't want to lose it, then repeat the process, and you'll find that the last 'take', button you pressed won't be available, as it has been used so you select another and so on.

If you're piecing together a solo, the five take memories, can be slotted in over the original first take, replacing the sections you choose. Even if that doesn't work out as you'd expected, then the Undo button will get you out of the woods. Finally, when you've assembled your masterpiece, you can discard the unused takes.

Record and mix

Most computer-based hard disk recording systems will, at the very least, offer some kind of rudimentary virtual mixing console. Not to be outdone, the DR8 has its own internal mixer which can control the level and pan of each track, plus two auxiliary sends to external devices. There's also a 'bus', function that allows you to internally mix down tracks to other unused or unwanted tracks, entirely in the digital domain.

If you're using the individual outputs on the DR8, then the mixer section has no effect, but if you use the analogue master outputs, headphones or the digital output, then the mixer will do its thing, including automation. The potency of the mixer section should not be underestimated. If you need all the inputs you can muster on your desk when recording with the DR8, then only having to find two rather than eight inputs on your desk to actually hear what's going on, is indeed a godsend.

Before you get round to using the mixer, you'll have to record something first. Below the 20-segment LED peak level meters are the track record/input select buttons. When active they glow a delicious red, and beneath their in parallel are the smaller, 'Channel On', buttons, with accompanying lime green LEDs. When editing, these two rows of buttons take on new roles as source and destination indicators. Each record input channel can be configured to receive/steal signals from any input: Analog 1-8, bus L or R and digital channels 1 or 2. At the very bottom of this section are eight gain control pots, that can be used to trim the input levels of analogue signals.

"because hard disk recording doesn't involve any significant cueing up time, you can work your way through a song without any delays at all"

To use the mixer, press the dedicated 'Mix', button, and the meters become a bar graph of the current status of the mixer. Using the jog/shuttle wheel, you can move between functions such as level and pan, and adjust them by selecting the appropriate track with the channel on key. The locator display keeps you informed of the status and values. Selecting the 'All', key gives access to the master fader. Mixer settings can be stored as a series of 'snapshots', which can then be replayed at predetermined locate points, producing a fair degree of mix automation. You can also make adjustments yourself, in realtime and with the MIDI interface board. Mixer functions can be controlled via MIDI, and snapshots called up with program changes.

Thru Mix is a special feature that doubles the capacity of the mixer by playing the recorded tracks, and routing whatever is present at the DR8's input through to the mixer, via its own independent set of mixer parameters.

The sub club

A good deal of the DR8 is accessible through dedicated buttons marked in white legends, but there exists an underworld too. Pressing 'Sub-Menu', gives you access to the functions that are marked in orange. Among these are the 'disk', submenu, which has a variety of actions including Time (remaining space), Format, Erase, and Back-up. 'Digi', lets you set the sample rate to 48, 44.1, 44.056 or 32kHz and sets the DR8 up to send type I or II digital audio signals, and synchronise to a number of sources.

'Set-Up', allows you to personalise the display of the DR8 and prepare it for MIDI control, while 'Sync', provides a menu for sending out various sync formats dependent on the cards you have installed. With this model, the MIDI card sends out MIDI clock and MIDI Timecode, and responds to MIDI Machine Commands. At the moment, being able to slave the DR8 to MIDI Timecode has yet to be implemented. The sooner the better, Akai!

Other sub-menu commands include setting up digital inputs and a locator offset, plus a few extra mixer functions. There's varispeed too, with a remarkable range of -41.3% to +58.3%.

Performance and editing

Turning on the DR8 can be nerve-racking, as it goes through a search for any hard disks attached. Sometimes it searches in vain, and turning it off and then back on again cures this, but it doesn't make it any easier to live with (according to Akai, this has now been fixed -Ed). My work on the DR8 was initially jaded by there being absolutely no hard disk recognised at all, and for a moment I thought I'd been given just the DR8 recorder, with no storage. It wasn't until I lifted the lid off the thing that I found the problem, which was a loosely-connected ribbon cable that hadn't been clamped in properly. After much gnashing of teeth, I was at last ready to record, replay and review.

As mentioned earlier, the basic record functions are obvious. There are eight numbered orange lights in the locate window, which illuminate for each track, whenever there is a recording present. This can be useful if you want to strip out any recorded silent passages to save disk space.

When tracks are being recorded or replayed, the DR8's hard disk gets busy, and rattles like a geiger counter on a day trip to Sellafield. I could imagine some less informed individuals taking their DR8 back to the shop, complaining that it makes odd noises. But if you've punished an ADAT for a while, you'd think the DR8 was small beer in the erroneous noises league.

Laying down tracks

One of my first tasks of the DR8 was to edit up a demo for a mate's band. They'd had the plug pulled on them (literally), in the studio, and needed to extend the length of a song. Using the shuttle wheel to roughly spot the edit point, I then twirled the jog dial to home in. Used in conjunction with the 'fine', control button, you can move through the audio in subframes, roughly 4mS steps.

This isn't a strict motion though, as you can manually speed up or slow down over a point to hear all the audio in motion. What you do next is store the point for reference, or if you know what you intend to do, then place it in the appropriate in or out location.

The jog/shuttle process could have been made easier with a more helpful locate display. All you see is the time position jostling back and forth, and so it's easy to get a little lost. With old tape editing you could observe a 'chalk' mark, and I felt the DR8 could benefit from a similar approach. If the display could toggle to all zeros and give positive or negative figures as you move around an edit point, then you'd know how far forward or backward you were from that initial point. You could reset the relative time counter, but going negative on this produces a 24 hour readout i.e. 23, 59, 59, etc. And not everyone will want to rest their relative time positions. I felt that a 'jog position' feature could easily be implemented, and the display reset button could have this as a secondary function in jog/shuttle mode.

The editing facilities do require familiarisation, and through most of my work with the DR8 I kept the manual close to hand, so that I could be sure that I was implementing the type of edit that I wanted. Okay, so there is the undo button, but just knowing that you're going in the right direction is comforting when there is such a limited visual feedback of the operations. Here's what you can do:

(i) Copy. This copies a specified section of track, moves it to a new location and overwrites any existing material at that location.

(ii) Copy + Insert. This works in a similar way to Copy, except that any audio at the new copy location will not be erased, but moved back.

(Hi) Move. This is a cut and paste style of editing, where an audio section can be removed and placed elsewhere, overwriting any recordings at the new location.

(iv) Move + Insert. This is the same as Move, except that any audio present at the Move destination is moved back and not overwritten.

(v) Insert. A useful function that enables you to Insert gaps of a specific length into audio track, at a predetermined point.

(vi) Erase. The Erase function cuts out a section of audio, but does not alter the timing/position of those tracks following that cut.

(vii) Delete. Delete cuts out a specified section of audio, and then joins the audio together, moving the subsequent audio after the cut forward.

(viii) Slip/Slip Track. On the DR8 there are two of these edit parameters, yet the explanation is only given for Slip. This function allows you to move audio forward or backward in time.

I used practically all of these edit functions at some point. Delete was particularly useful in sorting out timing problems between tracks, especially when preparing the CD Effects Tutorial (see the Re:Mix CD in this issue), which was compiled entirely on the DR8.

Summary

Well, I must confess that I really did have a change of heart over the DR8. It's a very exciting machine, so much so that describing the eight x 1/4" balanced jacks with pairs of switching low, mid and high gain inputs and the other eight jacks with low and high gain outputs was nearly overlooked.

The internal mixer's master outputs and two auxiliary sends are also lucky to get a mention. So too is the SCSI interface, for additional hard disk or back-up storage, and the XLR (AES) and RCA/Coaxial (S/PDIF) digital inputs and outputs. Even the BNC connector providing the DR8 with sync from video or digital sources fails to capture the imagination, but together, these things contain the essence of the DR8. It's about convenience, usefulness and portability.

This was nowhere more apparent than when I was doing an A/V session editing music for a David Attenborough documentary called Incredible Suckers. It should be on your BBC2 screens by the time you read this. The nightmare scenario was that the computer system I was using ran out of hard disk space. Nobody wanted to junk anything, so I popped home, picked up the DR8 and carried on doing audio edits with that. Admittedly, being thus far unable to slave the DR8 to MTC was a drag, and so the edited audio was flown in to an ADAT, which was then synced to picture.

After that, I never quite felt the same about the DR8, as it had saved the day. In the meantime, I look forward to a more comprehensive MIDI card, as it would be useful to be able to merge the input from a keyboard, to appear at the output with the MIDI clock or even MTC. Although mixing MTC with other MIDI data is not generally recommended, such a facility would at least broaden the considerable usefulness of the DR8 in more basic applications.

Yet it seems that once again Akai have provided a tool that will meet the needs of the many, and only meet with disapproval from a few. The remote autolocator has to be a consideration for serious users, but as its stands you're by no means left out in the cold. In fact, in its 4u flight case it looks very cosy here in my flat. I'll be sorry to see it go.

Bob Dormon's effects tutorial on this month's CD was prepared entirely on the DR8. No animals were injured during the recording process (except Si Si).