Cat's Cradle...

The H8000 comes with a little utility to route all the inputs and outputs, and that image above is a screenshot of what I ended up with last night. The rub: I’m able to use the H8000FW as the Hub of my Digital Lifestyle. I will say that I can’t squeeze quite as low a latency out of it as I can from the Lynx AES16, but that’s to be expected, as FW isn’t (in real life, at least) as fast as the PCI buss.

Still, a 21ms round trip is fine, and not noticeable, really. I got it to 10ms on the Lynx, and that isn’t noticeable at all, and truthfully is well within the general noise of the universe. But I have to make a 11ms sacrifice in order to switch to the supremely convenient method I have going on now.

All that aside, another interesting thing happened yesterday. I’ve wanted a Lexicon 300 since they originally came up with the damn thing. I’ve used them in the Studio many times, and had somehow managed to convince myself that having one at home would Increase my Productivity and make my shit Better.

I went over to Tidepool yesterday to get an AES DSUB cable to hook my Mytek convertor to the H8000, and come to find out he had a Lexi 300 going for a reasonable price. I fawned over it, and he talked me in to taking it home to try out. (Truthfully, he didn’t have to talk too hard.)

So, after getting it home, getting the above-mentioned routing nightmare behind me, and getting it in my rig, I settled down to a couple hours of comparison. Let me just say this: either the H8000FW wipes the floor with the Lexi 300 vis-a-vis reverbs, or the 300 doesn’t sound as good as I remember it sounding. Well, the former is true either way, I guess.

Now, having said that, I would still very much like to have the 300. There’s a certain grainy character to it that works really well for synth pads and vocals and other mid-rangy stuff, but it would be supremely irresponsible of me, financially speaking, to keep it. I already used my gear budget (’til, like, 2011) on this H8000FW, so I have to control the monkey on my back and take this fucker back to TidePool.

This, in a meandering fashion, brings us to our subject for today. What’s the One That Got Away for you? Have you ever had a piece of gear in your possession that you dearly wanted to keep, but had to give back for personal or financial reasons?