CHRIS SHEPERD: Everybody loves Pro Tools. At CRC, we have three Pro Tools rigs, one in each of our music studios. They're all matched because there's clients that float between room to room and we always need to be able to have the same plugins, same horsepower. You need to be able to plug that hard drive in and make it work room to room. We have really nice small room in our basement just for doing vocals, but you need to be able to flow in that room song to song to song. You can't go, "Oh yeah, the plugins," so it's always matched.

This Pro Tools rig is a 48-input-48-output system. Sometimes it's big enough and sometimes it's not. The clocking on this thing is an Apogee Big Ben. We like the Big Ben just because we listened to it and we thought it sounded better. I didn't really want to spend the money but when I can hear the difference, I have hard time not spending the money. All you have to do is convince me that it sounds better and I'll buy it. So we did put the Big Ben. Big Ben works great.

Now we have the expansion chassis for the extra card. This is a Pro Tools HD 7 so it means there's seven cards. There's a core card and six process cards. It's a G5 as we're upgrading all of our HD systems to Mac Pros. This one is on the list. I think we're coming up soon next month for the upgrade, but obviously we've updated all the cards.

It's in the room so we have it in a whisper chest -- in a whisper case which makes it nice because it's in the room, it's accessible quickly because you're opening that CD drawer all the time so you want it very close to where you are and not have to run out of the room each time. It's made custom on the back with several fans so it stays cool. We have a temperature gauge on it so we can watch the temperature of the rig to make sure it doesn't heat up too fast. Every cabling combination, mostly SATA, SATA in and out is what we use most of the time but it you know FireWire 800 and 400 and such. I think that's about it for the Pro Tools rig.