I have something of a luxury; with my job I have access to all sorts of abandoned tat. In my studio at home I have an aging ProTools 24 system which I bought at auction from a studio that went bust, as well as modern ProTools LE system. The idea is to use the ProTools 24 system for tracking as it has more channels available, and then mix it on the LE system. The old system is so short on power for mixing its virtually useless but it IS mega stable for tracking.
So this weekend I started building the system. I managed to get hold of a G4 933 with 1GB ram for the princely sum of £86. I have fitted it with a Marathon rackmount kit. Took a bit of persuasion, but it is now happily running OS 10.3.4 and ProTools TDM 6.4, with a ProTools d24 and a DSP farm card in it. There is 24 bit ADAT bridge on there, and a single 888/24. One channel of the ADAT bridge is connected to an 8 channel mic pre unit, and I'm trying to track down another for the other ADAT port - all together that will give us 24 channels of input, 16 with mic preamps. We'll be recording at 44.1kHz /24 Bit as there will be fewer artifacts when converting to CD than 48k, and the system has been happily tested recording 24 tracks for an hour.
Its strange to think that this system, built from bits that were destined for the bin, would have cost over £10,000 about 5 years ago. Old technology, yes, but its reliable. And most importantly, ProTools IS the industry standard, and if we need to go to a studio for any reason, we can take our sessions and just carry on working. But for the moment, we can record at our own pace, and then I can take the sessions home to edit and mix ....