Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: The Yamaha AN1x Synthesizer mailing list

Sorry for coming to this thread a little late ;-)

Personally I use a Kenton Plugstation, sadly no longer manufactured. Occasionally see them on ebay.

To me, it's the best plg host ever made. Why .....?

It hosts 4 plg cards of your choice .... I have DX, AN, VL, and PF. The four cards operate on midi channels 1 to 4.

It provides 8 analog outputs, each card can be allocated its own stereo output. You can route them all the the same outputs if you want to merge the signals into one stereo output, and can set volume and pan positions for each card.

It also has an 8 channel ADAT out, which provides pristine output without digital to analog conversion, again, each card can be allocated its own stereo output pair, or the sounds can be merged.

The sounds get recorded into my DAW via an audio interface with ADAT in, so there is no D/A then A/D conversion. The recorded signal is pristine.

D/A conversion is only needed at the playback stage when outputting the recorded audio.

Only limitation is that for the plugstation to be a digitally synced slave, you have to connect it to an SW1000XG card in a computer. Kenton never got around to providing a digital in on the plugstation itself for clocking purposes. So if not using an SW1000 card, and I don't any more, then the ADAT signal from the plugstation has to be the clock master, with everything else slaving to it. Not an issue though, everything syncs up fine.

Anyway, there's my 2pence worth.

Cheers,

N