Does anyone have a suggestion on a good, relatively cheap ADAT for Avids.  I looked at the two supported ones

• Alesis AI-3
• RME ADI-8 DD

The Alesis is discontinued and the RME is about $2000.  The company I work for has been buying Behringer Utlragains which run about $300 each.  Cheap but you get what you pay for since they seem to go bad after about 6 months and they XLRs don't lock in so they can fall out for no reason.  I'm looking for one that does optical out of the avid to 8 Channel out with either XLR that lock or 1/4 inch cables and mabye last at least a year under heavy use.

Wow ADAT, a blast from the past. I don't know, but I do recall back in our CMX days the Alesis would not lock up to time code...can't recall the exact issue, but we ended up returning it. If you're doing just a pure "dump" maybe it will work. If you can, try before you buy, or pay so little, if it doesn't work, it won't matter.

Would something like Roland DAW work for your application?

blast from the past?  haha.  Unfortunately everyone we work with needs to be able to monitor 8 channels from the Avid like they did on Meridiens and my company wants to do it as cheaply as possible. 

 Righto I see you're in LA, so that's probably very popular for film work. What's everyone else out there doing.. useing ADATs? I seem to recall there were some 3rd party boxes that helped it chase time code, but back then the Alesis folks didn't understand video applciations, but that was 10 years ago. Anyway I'm no help. Good luck.

yeah this is strictly to convert ADAT to analog 8 ch out so we can use all the Mackie 1604 mixers we have.  As far as what most people are doing out here...cutting on Meridiens and then complaining when they can't load the lastest Itunes on their 10.2.6 Mac. 

why not  DA88 no? I think those are still made? We have a dat recorder here though it is el-cheapo. I would buy 5 on Ebay and use em til they die.

:)

 heck yeah, forgot about those! good call.

Behringer ...

http://www.behringer.com/ADA8000/

$250-ish on the street

Thanks for the reply Randy.  That's actually the exact one we use now.  I guess you can't beat the price which is why we use them.  Only problem is under daily life a lot of them seem to have about a 6 month lifespan and the XLR connectors don't lock so occasionally someone loses a channel when a cable just falls out.