Just for historical interest, I designed and installed a system for Tussauds New York which initially used eight of Richmond Sound Design's AudioBox system to cover the entire exhibition, with many multiple, synchronised tracks. The entire system, including video playback and lighting was turned on early in the morning by the cleaners and turned off at night by the duty technician, using a fairly basic show-control system linked to a simple switch panel. Audio playback was from SCSI hard-drives and ran without fault for over ten years, fourteen hours a day, three hundred and sixty four days a year. A couple of years ago, as hard-drives and power-supplies began to fail, we replaced the eight units with four of RSD's AudioBox 2 units (essentially a rack-mount Windows PC with a solid-state drive) and a bunch of MOTU interfaces. As far as I'm aware, the system is still running happily today. Richmond Sound Design's web-site is here: http://www.richmondsounddesign.com/
If that system's a bit too complex and expensive for you, you could look at Figure 53's QLab MacOS-based playback system as a lower-cost alternative: it'll play multi-channel interleaved .WAV files, which makes sure that your files are sample accurate, and can easily be set up to start up and run on turn-on. It's used extensively in theatre sound playback systems and is extremely robust. A new version is on the way which is currently in private beta, but which has some very interesting additions. There's a free demo version, limited to to two outputs, available on the Figure 53 web-site which is here: http://figure53.com/ The only caveat I would mention is that MOTU drivers for the current versions of MacOS do not appear to be particularly stable, so if you're considering this, it may be wiser to look at interfaces from Metric Halo or RME, both of which have proved themselves to be extremely reliable in the long-term. Both systems feature an output matrix, full in, out and crosspoint level control, timed fade commands MSC and MTC options and can run multiple cue-lists. I have used both for many years now and find both developers offer exceptional support. Please feel free to contact me if you've got an questions about either system. Regards, John > I've got a couple of installations that require a standalone device that > will play 8 or more channels (octophonic mixes so all tracks need to be > played simultaneously) can anyone think of an affordable standalone player > ? The museum staff will not know anything about audio technology so > preferably it will work just by pressing "on". I found one but it was > ridiculously priced (nearly 4000 euros !!). Ive just found this : > > http://www.waveplayer.de/ > > > which seems quite affordable - has anyone used them ? > > cheers,, > Gus > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20130209/a7a74d9e/attachment.html> > _______________________________________________ > Sursound mailing list > Sursound@music.vt.edu > https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
