Hard disk recording company SeaSound, headed by Tom Oberheim, now offers the Solo, a complete "front end" and controller for computer-based digital audio hard disk recording and playback systems. If you have been using your PC or Mac to record and edit audio then you may have wished for a proper unit that you can plug in your mics or guitar instead of messing around the back of the computer with the sound card. This two rack space unit comes with a PCI bus controller card, cable, how-to video, CD-ROM with application software and instruction manual.

Solo eliminates the need of the sound card and can run as a standalone digital recording/playback/editing system or run under many existing digital audio software suites available. A small, self-contained recording console, Solo has two microphone pre-amplifiers with 65dB of gain and both balanced XLR inputs and 1/4 inch instrument inputs on the front panel. There are mixing controls for mixing input signals as well as the audio already recorded in your computer. You can mix together live sounds coming into microphones along with MIDI tracks coming from your samplers and synths all in stereo ready to record into your computer.

Professional touches include insert points for external analog processing, signal "present" and "clip" LEDs and two headphone jacks. On the digital side, Solo converts all analog signals into 24-bit S/PDIF digital at sample rates from 8kHz to 96kHz. Solo also converts S/PDIF to analog, records to DAT and sync to S/PDIF and will import data from DAT or other digital sources. There are MIDI jacks and a transport control interface via the SeaSound Floor Switch Controller.