They've been around for awhile now, but I haven't seen threads about hard experience. Would love to know how you are monitoring, what sorts of drives you are using, do you roll backup and with what?

phil p

I'm curious too...

I'm thinkin' about moving my HD24's to backup duties if the JoeCo's are as solid as they appear to be.

About all I know is that they were used at MerleFest, and evidently worked solidly... no idea about anything other than what I read in the trades.

A friend is beta-testing the new JoeCo Black Box with digital inputs and seems very pleased with it.

I would love a JoeCoe ADAT to sit in my mixer rack to pair with my 2626+laptop/desktop combination but the price is quite expensive. A digital only model would be nice but all the digital models also include the analogue inputs, whilst said to be quite good, don't really have a purpose when one uses a digital desk as their front end.

I've used a pair of JoeCo BlackBoxes in recording a part of a major act's live performance for a major mobile phone company two days ago, and I used them in parallel to record 24 channels on a pair of brand new Seagate Freeagent 1TB harddisks just in case one failed, at least I'd have the other one healthy.

And as if I knew it, one of the hard disks started to fail toward the end of the performance and finally the second BlackBox first reported a slow drive warning and then gave up on recording reporting a bad song file.

I am not sure if it had to do with the drive, or the unit itself, for I've noticed some erratic behaviour on that particular unit earlier on. Although I had slaved it to the first one, in a few occasions during the preparations it refused to follow the transport commands of the master and did not start recording. In order not to have such nightmares with no time to recover, I had to start recording on the both units half an hour before the actual portion of the performance I was hired to record, which was only 4 minutes long, and the unit that I designated as slave failed a minute before the end, rendering its recording useless.

Luckily, I had foreseen this possibility so obtained two BlackBoxes to record the same thing in parallel so the first one worked okay and captured the performance successfully, although backing up its recording immediately after the performance was a very nerve-wracking process. The client had spent more than ten times the money they paid me on the entire section, in HD video shooting and the blacklighting and all the other coreographic work, so had the first BlackBox or its HDD failed on me too before I managed to get a healthy backup, I would have been very likely looking for a new country to live in right now.

The units I have used were unbalanced I/O version, the use of which looked to be pretty straightforward by the first look and thought, but it proved to be more than that.

I used a dedicated Midas Venice desk to feed the Blackboxes through the insert points, which was also used to feed the PA via a Midas Heritage at the FOH, and the stage monitoring via an M7CL.

Firstly, the unit's metering is very basic and poor, so you have no idea where you are hitting in the greens, whether the signal is a "good" green, or a "poor" green. Plus, the moment the live sound guy reaches for the gain knob to push something up a bit, you are in the yellow, which is not too far from red if the speakers/singers rage into the microphone they hold.

I had to come up with tons of workarounds just to make sure that I did not see yellow, which was very time consuming, and at times frustrating for the live sound people I was working alongside, for they needed to feed the audience plenty while I had two dogs that had to be fed quite modestly from the same tap. One gain structure for two different and at times conflicting requirements.

It doesn't work in real life scenarios the way it is described on the paper for this unbalanced I/O version. I certainly don't think that one can do a successful recording without overs with this every time, unless one supplements this unit with a proper splitter with proper padding facilities.

Perhaps a balanced I/O version might work better with signals through direct outs of a desk, for apparently it has 2dB better headroom in +4dBu than in -10dBv which you have to stick to if you are getting the signal from an unbalanced insert point- which is not much, but in desperation every dB of headroom is like a grace from God for your desperate prayers as you have your eyes locked on the metres. But still, you'd need very high quality padding/line-amping solutions for every track.

Or if your mixer is a digital one, with ample number of ADAT/AES-EBU outputs to feed a dedicated recording line, then a digital I/O version could be easier to use, where you are still in the hands of the dude running the desk. If the desk gets digital overs, you surely get the same overs.

The setup of the unit is pretty straightforward. Menus are no-brainer to browse around and the terminology is pretty clear, thanks to the designer being a native speaker and not some Chinese or Japanese guy with funny spellings. External keyboard works as it is described.

I have synced them to the RME ADI-8 DS as the wordclock master via the SPDIF out of a Digidesign 003R so I don't know how good its internal wordclock is.

The headphone outputs on the both units were very inconsistent. The slave unit that messed up the recording had a very good phones output, which I used for checking what's going on all throughout, but the master unit which recorded fine output nothing but a "khhhhhzprrrrrtwwwwzzzzzhhhhh...." from the headphone output (these were direct-out-of-the-box units from the local distributor, by the way).

I have checked out the healthily recorded material by importing them into PTLE and auditioning through Equation RP-21 headphones sometime after the end of the concert, and found it to be pretty successful. I will be taking it to the studio this evening for a bed-mix for video editing and will be able to report the sonic quality better.

My experience so far with this unit is that, it may be okay for applications where you can turn to the band in the case of a cock-up and say, "sorry, the hard drive crapped out (even though it might not have been its fault)" and get away with it, but...

You can never answer to the basic requirements of a serious professional multitrack location recording in a 1U unit full stop.

It is not BlackBoxes fault. It's just that that's the best any manufacturer can do in such a small space. Location Recording demands so many different safety measures that it is practically not possible to address to all of them in a single U rackspace. Don't dream on it.

One way or another, you end up having a 10U rack full of equipment in front of you, if you don't want to be chased by a group of corporate people shouting behind you "pay back that forty grand you ruined along with our tenures, you dumbfvck!!!"

And of course, as per my experience... my first experience with them, if you are planning to use BlackBox in your location recordings, you need to buy them in pairs for every 24 track you plan to capture, if you want to guarantee a 100% successful recording in your hand everytime.

And imagine how many different signal domain scenarios you may face in your career, where you are working with a digital desk one day, and a desk like Heritage with balanced insert points the next day, and then another day with a desk like Venice with single point unbalanced I/O... AND, you have to have a separate pair of JoeCo BlackBoxes for each type, for your BlackBox can either be unbalanced I/O, or balanced I/O, or ADAT. Not all at the same time. Bummer.

Man I may as well go and buy a Radar and end this pain.

In my opinion, the JoeCo BlackBox is not for location recordists to take it around from place to place. It is aimed at permanent installations on location.

Hope this helps.

B.

Have you talked this over with Joe Bull?

I know a couple of people who are very happy with their Black Boxes on location.

You could have had a duff drive or a faulty Black Box which may be an untypical fault in your unit.

I would have liked to hear what Joe said about the problem.

I dont really agree with that.. The digital version with ADAT is really a basic device by todays standards.. There's no pre amps, inserts or routing or effects or midi to worry about.. Its just converting a digital input to a wav file and storing it on a hard drive and without analog ins, you could build a device like that within the size of a zoom H2..

I would expect it could be built for a mere fraction of the price the joeco costs also.. Something tells me there's excessive markup on the blackbox, It seems like a rip off to me.. I half justified the price in my head by presuming it would be rock solid for really critical live work but if thats not the case then its really got nothing going for it..


Which is funny because thats exactly how they market it.. As a device to capture live recordings..

No I haven't. I'd had a few email exchanges with him about his external wordclocking decisions when he had the unit at its prototyping stage and he was pretty defensive about his choices, and was in fact quite offended by my comments (obviously I failed to pass my humour across) so I chose not to contact him in this instance.

I don't know how critical sessions your friends are using their BlackBoxes for, John, so I can't comment on their feedback, but in my case, I was quite worried. I don't know if I'm lucky or not for not trying the units on a less important gig before taking them up to a major acts gig. In a different scenario, it could have crapped out on me on that major act after having worked fine on 10 minor acts earlier and gained my vote of confidence so much so that I wouldn't have bothered with a parallel secondary recording. That could have ended my career.

I also had a Western Digital My Book Mirror Edition RAID drive, which at some point I'd thought of using with one BlackBox, thinking that if one drive failed, the other one would carry on, but then I thought "what if the front buffer of the RAID system fails and the whole thing drops out?" and decided to utilise two BlackBox units recording in parallel via a patchbay in splitter mode, which has been a decision that proved me right. The worst case scenario did happen, and my precaution saved me from a catastrophic affair.

I don't know, may be this system will not do that ever again for another 5 years, but it happened to me in my very first experience with it, and my untrusting past experiences really saved my ass, rather than an advancement over an existing technology offered to me with a new gear.

From now on, if I was to use a BlackBox, I would either employ two BlackBox units running in tandem, or if I had only one BlackBox at disposal, then I would also use my 003R/ADI-8DS system as the secondary recorder and also for a more detailed level metering a BlackBox is unable to offer.

And if I were to choose BlackBox as my hard disk recording system of choice, I would not go for an unbalanced I/O type, for it also costs you a 24-way patchbay/splitter and a separate 24-way harness between insert points and the patchbay in order to make room for a secondary recorder. And that's easily another 5-600 quid for you with quality cables and Neutrik plugs etc, unless you are prepared to settle with cheaper looms with moulded plugs from Maplin or Studiospares. But that would be like really shooting for the bog standard, though... Low cost multitrack recording, low cost cabling, low cost medium, low budget gigs, low cost transport by pirate cabs, and we only accept cash in hand thank you, hehe... anyway, I digress.

Whereas if you bought a balanced I/O version, you could simply feed its balanced outs to your secondary recording system and monitor it there without having to bring it back to the desk, for you would be using direct outs to feed the BlackBox anyway (hoping that they are pre-fader direct sends).

It seems to me like, although JoeCo BlackBox is a pretty decent attempt at addressing to a certain gap in the market, by the time you put back the corners cut from it so that you secure those comfortable recording conditions we are accustomed to on location, the price comes back up to the same level with the solutions already existed before it arrived at the scene. Doh!

Perhaps in the future editions, they may look into employing two USB outputs that can feed the same data on two separate drives like a USB-RAID, so that even if the unit itself works rock solid the way it is claimed, at least the chances of having a bad drive spoil the session is halved. That's when a device like this might be justified against all the other corners cut from it.

And oh, wordclock syncing via SPDIF/AES is still a pain in the ass. What's wrong with using a 75-ohm BNC just like rest of the crowd?

B.

I know Joe from way back during his early Sadie years. I saw him at PLASA and we talked for quite a while. His reasoning behind the JoeCo black box was a unit that was easy to use, took up the minimum of space, and would be available in a number of options to suit the users needs. Having looked at it I think he has succeeded admirably in what he set out to do. Whether the box will suit a you as a particular user only the individual concerned can say. Knowing what I know of Joe, I would hazard a guess that the unit itself is pretty bullet-proof, bearing in mind what is likely under the hood, the most likely point of failure will be hard drives or hard drive interfaces. As too the pricing, these units are never going to sell by the thousand, much like quality microphones there is obviously a premium to make the product viable as a business in the marketplace. What I can say is that IMHO Joe Bull is a very smart designer who really knows what is going on inside his gear, rather than so many others that just build kit using other peoples proprietary designs. If you have issues using his kit, I'm very sure that he would want to hear from you and very likely would be able to pinpoint the problem.


Roland

Dear Barish : Hey I appreciate the headsup and the detailed report. Of course many will nitpick at your report but after reading it and its followup, it is clear that this product needs to go through more testing and real field use before it is ready for prime-time. This plus another thread from another poster on this forum have convinced me to stay away from this tempting device.

I just wish that someone had written something so convincingly about the Genex 9000 before I bought it (still unused sitting in its original box :-(()

Thanks and regards,
Baithak

I think the nature of the device is being developed and marketing wrong and there's no innovation in the product really.. which reduces the potential user base and creates the problem. The business model is back the front IMO.

A small box the size of a guitar pedal with 3 ADAT ins and 64gb of flash memory and a USB for connection to a computer, is what (i think) the market needs and what JoeCo should be doing.. Then you could plug in 8 channel pre amps with adat out straight into a small box, hit record to flash memory and you're done.. That is technically not that difficult to achieve and it would be compact, elegant and simple.. The right company should be able to build that item and sell it for around $500USD, which would leave the black box for dead.

I don't think that the Blackbox is trying to reinvent the wheel, it is a simple plug and play (record in this instance) machine.

Flash memory is unreliable for higher data rates and I would suspect that 24 tracks could really present problems. The JoeCo allows drives to be detached from the system and immediately connected to an editing (DAW) for further processing, it's interface is as simple as possible, big, well lit buttons that can be hit easily in the heat of a gig situation. Realistically I doubt that it could ever sell for $500, not and allow enough profit for a company to survive. Obviously one of the users above had some problems on a gig, however, it is highly likely that the issues may have been to do with hardrives and nothing at all to do with the blackbox itself, until that is established for sure, it is unfair to dis the product. IMHO this is nothing like the Gennex scenario, their kit just didn't ever work as advertised and the company made no attempt to deal with the issues that almost all of their client base raised.

As for the product being better suited to install, I totally disagree with this. It was designed for touring and live sound applications. At PLASA I saw it in record and play for 24 tracks running quite happily with no obvious problems. The technology to do what the blackbox does isn't "pushing the envelope" so there is no reason to suspect that it should be unreliable.

Roland

I want it now. NOW NOW NOW. 32 channel version or 24.

I would buy two of them.

It wouldnt really matter, the device im envisioning could have USB instead of flash drive and it would be just as simple and effective.. but i think latest generation flash memory is easily fast enough for 24 tracks anyway..


Thats where i think the design and development and marketing play a large role.. The basic function of the digital joeCo is just dumping ADAT input to wav files.. Its technically a simple process compared to other devices that sell for far less than the JoeCo.. If the Joeco were designed as a small converter box and aimed towards songwriters and hobbyist studios to be used in tandem with an 8 channel pre amp it would expand its potential user base enormously and still serve the same purpose as it currently does.. By having all these other functions and making versions with analog inputs its adding unnecessary cost as most people are going to want pre amps with metering and line inputs anyway..

Fair enough.. Thats why the flash memory could actually serve to improve stability on an item like this.. Aside from that though i may have been a tad harsh in judging it, although i have heard other reports that werent promising also..


Thats true, but it still gets down to how well its implemented..

That I can't be sure of and in my experience of using memory sticks they can sometimes zip through the data and then you get bottlenecks, reliable, sustained data rates are the order of the day, with 8 tracks probably not a problem, remember, the idea is that you can immediately connect the finished drive to a DAW and start editing or mixing, not something you would be wanting to do with flash memory.




The JoeCo comes in several different flavours, AES/EBU, Adat and analogue (as far as I am aware). This gives the customer options for choosing which one interfaces with his system. If it were designed for the home hobbyist studios as a converter box it would be a different device and arguably there are plenty of interfaces for a computer out there. Remember that most home studio set-ups are based around DAW's purely as most people do a lot of editing, mixing, and midi in the box, the JoeCo is a multitrack recorder/plaer, nothing else. Even without the options it's never going to cost $500, Alesis with all their marketing, buying power and presence in the industry were not able to sell their HD24 at anywhere near the sub $1000 mark and that is a relative mass market product.



I have heard pretty good reports about it on the whole, indeed this is the first I've heard of someone having problems. I do know that certain drive caddies can have problems with sustained data rates due to the USB/Firewire to Sata conversion boards used, though this happens a lot less these days.



Joe Bull has a huge amount of experience in computerized audio recording, this is the guy behind the Sadie HD64, PCM2, etc, both of which deal with a lot more recording channels, he has also been behind the design of other industry stand alone recorders. On this basis I suspect that a lot of the technology is proven proprietary design that he has used many times before. His track record is of stuff that works and is reliable, I've seen nothing in this thread that proves that isn't the case.

To Murton, the devices can be daisy chained up to four units, so two would give you 48 tracks and so on. Still a cheap option for a professional box, when compared to devices like Radar. Look at the size and complexity of other devices that would record this number of tracks, for it's purpose I think that it's well thought out.

Regards


Roland

Roland and John, i emailed Joe a year back asking if there is a madi version in the works. I never got an answer. Do you guys know if he has plans for such a unit?

When I spoke to Joe at PLASA I understood that it was a possibility - he did not say when.

I dont mean cheap USB memory sticks when i say flash.. Im talking about the newer generation memory used in SSD's.. It can easily record 24 tracks.

Yes i am saying they should have made it a different device. The problem with blackbox is, nobody is going to pay $2500 for it unless they expect to make money with it recording live gigs, or they have cash to burn.. Its marketed towards a very small segment and the same type of functionality could be produced in a more streamlined device which would appeal to a wider demographic..

No but what im talking about isnt anything like the HD24 either.. thats still got all the analog ins and metering on it which isnt really needed if you have pre amps with those functions on them already..

To me the joeco is a device i would have expected to see someone make in 2002.. Its essentially just another HD24. Personally I think its an antiquated concept and that type of item or at least the functionaltiy it offers could be designed far better nowdays..

My thinking of a device would be 24 or 32 channels of ADAT and a 64GB or 128GB SSD with a USB3 or eSATA interface to connect the device directly to a computer DAW for editing and mixing. Basically the same as an M-Audio Lightpipe but with an SSD in it. Make it 32 channels with SMUX and SMUX IV capable and then you have a 32/16/8 channel 48/96/192 simple hard disk recorder.

It wouldn't be that hard to make an AES/EBU or MADI version either. It's just a digital audio to hard disk interface.

Add in basic user interface with an onboard LED screen for transport, metering and basic information and you'd have a half rack mount device. Hook up to a digital console, daisy chain a normal computer based interface for backup or another one of these units.

It's exactly what I'm after. A simple backup hard disk recorder solution.

Hi,

I usually just glance in from time to time and otherwise lurk in the background but I felt I should maybe pipe up here and explain a few things.

Regarding Barish's experience, this is the first I've heard about this problem (John Willett kindly alerted me to this thread and I thought I probably ought to join in). (Sorry, Barish, if I missed your humour when we emailed about wordclock a year or so ago - you obviously hid it well! ;-)

We do deprecate the use of Seagate Freeagent drives on our website - we've found that even when they are set to never enter their sleep mode they can sometimes decide to doze off even when there is a steady stream of audio data being written to them. It sounds as though this was the problem that you experienced.

We support RAID drives and currently recommend the Glyph 062E on our website. I've also used a DROBO successfully, though of course you can't guarantee that something earlier in the signal chain won't cause a problem which is why we didn't fit a twin USB2 interface on the BlackBox as simple mirroring of drives will never give you full redundancy.

Also, as detailed in the manual, we recommend that levels are set so that recordings largely occupy the green area of the meters but avoid the red LED (which come on at around -10dBFS) - the green starts illuminating at about -30dBFS.

The original concept for the BlackBox was for one man operation - the beleaguered live engineer who has to teach himself ProTools to be able to record the gig. In a multi-operator situation it's always going to preferable to have complete control over the signal flow and take a separate feed from mic splitters or something where you are not at the mercy of someone else turning up the mic gains. We designed the headroom on the BlackBox to be slightly higher than most normal consoles can produce from their insert points so the mic amps will clip before you overload the BlackBox's A-Ds. If you were to be hitting the red on the Blackbox you're already outputting a clipped signal.

Anyway, that's enough bandwidth for this email. I'll crawl back underneath my stone (and I still maintain that syncing to a bit clock (AES) is always preferable to a wordclock and having to regenerate a bit clock :-)

Cheers

Joe

FWIW, I've never dissed the product. In fact, I took it so seriously that I took it on a test drive in the first opportunity, and it got its shot on one of the highest profile acts in this country.

And I am still investigating this issue, as the idea of having such a compact multitrack recorder which allows you to transfer the recorded material into a computer realm on the fly still excites me..

I have just bumped into this on their website, which I don't remember reading in their hardprint manual:

I don't know when they put this in their FAQ, and I hope this is not after my review of the unit. I'll check the printed manual that came with the units to see if they really warned the users about this and I just missed it. Then that would be my bad because I read it a few times.


...And the weird metering scheme that tries to shift all the conventions established in us recordists' minds about the colour Red:

So Mr Bull wants us to think that when we are working on a BlackBox, if it is red, then it's not red yet.

Then how do we know that it's a "red" red?

That really messes up one's brain in a situation where one has a looong checklist to go through and refresh continuously. One device says if it is red, then it is red, while the other one says, "no it isn't?"

I really want to work with this unit, however while it makes some things much easier to achieve, it makes certain things unnecessarily more difficult as it is now.

B.

Mr. Bull, welcome to the forum!
We all appreciate the prescence of the manufacturers here as you often help improve the S/N ratio around here.
I hope you decide to develop a madi version, it would quickly find a home here as a simple backup device.

Hi Joe,

Obviously we were typing at the same time

Thanks for chiming in. Hey, as far as the humour goes, at least I've tried

Sorry if I offended you back in the day.

I spoke to your Turkish distributors in length today, with whom I have a very strong relationship, and I will hold onto these two units for a while more and try them with hard drives other than Seagates.

It did cost me a good money in additional multicores and a patchbay just to review your units, though. Luckily the client is paying for the Seagate drives which they will keep, and I'll be more than happy to oblige after this experience.

I still find your metering scheme quite odd and confusing. A red is a red. It must be a red. If you make people get used to saying "okay" to red, then when are they going to react to a red when they use other systems than yours? I don't think that you are doing the users any favours in that department.

I'll give it another go with your funny metering scheme in mind (talk about humour now, eh?) and keep you posted.

Regards,

B.

Actually I find this quite common - adjust so that the loudest peak just lights the red and then back-off a fraction.

This gives good headroom normally.

I have seen this sort of advice on other equipment at well.

Barish, I doubt the level meters were ever designed as anything but a very rough indicator.
FWIW my euphonix converters are pretty similar in their metering. Most of us do not use the converters to set levels.
What a lot of us do need, is something that has a low probability of pilot error. Congrats Joe, you hit a homerun!

This series (Freeagent) of drives became infamous some time ago for this very reason. Here, the drives were marketed (and priced) for the casual computer user who wanted extra space and/or needed a backup drive. They would not stay operational, even for short periods of time, and had very high rates of returns.

None taken - I just think you're wrong! ;-)

The thought process behind the metering scheme (accepting that there isn't enough height to fit a 24 segment LED meter on every channel) is that many people will "push the volume to 11" anyway, so we backed off the red meter such that there's still a bit of headroom when it first starts to come on. You can set the meters to have sticky peaks so that real "overs" will stay on forever if you so desire.

We even toyed with the idea of allowing people to set the meters up as they wanted but you then end up with someone renting a unit with non-standard metering which is a recipe for disaster so we dropped the idea. You'll always have more comprehensive metering on the console.

Out of interest, what software version are you running? I haven't seen you log on to download the latest software from the JoeCo website so you may be some months out of date. We don't charge for software updates to the basic recorder so the latest is up there free of charge for any end user to download and utilise (Sorry not trying to advertise here ;-)

Anyway, happy to answer questions but please excuse me if I am not online all the time because I can only do so many things in a day! :-) You can always get me via my normal email if you need an answer to a technical question.

Cheers

Joe

I was provided with the units upgraded to V2.0 or something prior to handing over, which is supposed to be the latest version.

A plasma metering similar to the one found on Prism Orpheus would have given a more accustomed idea about the levels, me thinks. How much more could it add on the retail price anyway? 100? 200? It would sure make the product a completely different beast.

I wouldn't want to have to re-learn how a red light should be read when I have so many other things to think about at work. "Well if it is red on this one, then it is bad, but if it is red on this one then it is not so bad, and if it is red on this one then it is not bad yet..."

That's not wise. A red is a red. It universally means "fail" in digital realm. No point in trying to fix something that is not broken. Yellow is where those peaks should touch and pull back, and not red.

I'll be in touch via email if I find other things to discuss then.

Kind regards,

B.

Yep, you are pretty much echoing what i said, just adding more features but same idea.. A small box with digital in that can record to SSD or similar.. Personally i dont think it needs metering (and obviously not analog ins) because most people can get that from their pre amps..


Exactly.. Its just converting an ADAT stream to wav files.. In my view i would not have metering on it, anything which is digital and interfaces with it (such as 8 channel pre amps) should have metering already and it would be better to see the device compact and inexpensive..

(And while im dreaming/conceptualising).. It would also be good to have a basic software mixer on the computer that allowed you to playback and monitor the files you have just recorded, or possibly even monitor the live ADAT input as well, which would provide a form of input metering..

If it were me, id get the basics of streaming ADAT to wav files done on flash memory and add any other good features up to a point where the price stayed around $500-600 retail.. If it can be built for that and still be viable profit wise, thats the point where i think it would sell really well..

Yep, ive been thinking this for a while and I think a lot of people would appreciate something streamlined like this once they saw it.

It's a brilliant idea. A 24 or 32 channel ADAT to SSD device with only basic features onboard and USB3 or Ethernet connection to hook up to the computer to have all the other more advanced features like monitoring, a basic mixer and to access the hard drive as a external HDD.

I'll talk to my mate and see what he thinks. I have the resources to make one or two concept devices but the software side would take a fair while to develop with my developing coding skills.