17" Laptop for SONAR?

I need to replace my badly out-of-date laptop fairly quickly. I have looked at the offerings from ADK, and their 7000 or 3800 models both look like excellent options; but I'm wondering if anybody knows of, or has any experience with, a 17-inch laptop that is good for audio. I haven't seen much discussion of 17-inchers - most of the laptops recommended for audio seem to be 15-inch models.

Sager has a couple of 17-inch offerings (the 9880 and the 4791, both of which are full-blown P4 processors), but evaluating their specs with regard to audio is beyond my expertise.

Any insights?

Thanks!

I'm never sure about how I am received because I always tell it like it is.

Cell phones are the coming thing in devices and they will be fitted for midi.

I got myself a plain ol' Dell 9300. I think it's a 1.86 ghz Pentium M and I have a gig of RAM. I disabled the on-board audio device and got a firewire audio interface. I ordered it with a 7200rpm internal drive and another 7200rpm external USBII drive.

I just finished a CD project on it and it worked great. 15-20 tracks per song, lots of compressors, reverbs, etc, DR-008, Kontakt 2 and Garritan Personal orchestra. Audio files were stored on the external drive and DR-008, K2 and GPO files were stored on the internal drive.

Never had a problem and had plenty of CPU power to spare.

Wynnsong, Can you elaborate about this machine of your friends??? Thanks, Wildman

If you are really interested my buddy is getting rid of his..... He needed something smaller.

ProjectM, Thank you for your input! I will look further! Incidentally, most of my Ancestors are, Sweedish/Norwegian! I look forward to visiting there sometime very soon! Wildman

By the way, I can't wait to check out Sonar 5. I really hope it'll be as sweet as it looks. and it'll look darn good on my 17" WUXGA display

ORIGINAL: jack_holeman

I'm never sure about how I am received because I always tell it like it is.

Cell phones are the coming thing in devices and they will be fitted for midi.

A Cell phone will not be an adequate DAW for many a moon !

Yes I believe you can get cell phones with midi functioning already.

The UK kids in 2005 went nuts over ringtones... one became a number one hit (cringe) and the advertising when I was there on TV was a one ringtone advert MINIMUM on every commercial break .

US Pyro now gives funtionality for ringtones, and there have been posters here who indirectly hinted at that they wanted to create ringtones.... The folks who did the Crazy Frog (now have an albumn out) Turned over £13 million pounds ...it's medium business in the UK and the flood gates opened.

The US is next ...trust me it was hell and I was only there for 2 weeks

Thanks for the replies, folks. After some further research and discussion, it seems that there is currently more power available, at least from the standpoint of audio work and stability, in the 15" models. Some promising 17" models are apparently on the horizon, but I can't afford to wait the month or two that it will take for them to appear.

Again, thanks for the input.

Hey Losguy, and Projectm.

can you guys run the ADK Sonar test on the Dell 9300 and post some numbers?
also please let me know if PCMCIA or Firewire audio card and what

i have seen conflicting reports on that laptop
thanks
scott
ADK

How about a dual core athlon in laptop?

Losguy: I honestly have no idea of how the PCI-E thing is working or affecting my system. I have no problems with the performance, and I haven't actually put very much effort into tweaking the OS yet. But yes, it works fine and I use the Sonitus pack of course and Native instrument stuff as well as Garritans personal Orchestra and a hefty use of vSampler 3. With a decent Audio interface, I don't think there would be a problem making fairly decent pro-sounding stuff on it either. I currently use the Edirol UA-700 and feel there's a lack in headroom on the thing. I would love to give E-MU 1616m a try. The 1820m sounds great.

And for dual screen, go for it! It's easy and conventient. I had a 15" lcd hooked up the first time which couldn't fit the desktop into so it just got funny using it. But I hooked up a 17" Dell Widescreen which was great! I will check the digital port on a 20" flat screen TV as well. And see how that goes.

And yes, Sick = insanely great

jcschild: I will look into it and report everything:) Yes, I have heard about some conflicts there too, but it doesn't seem to be such an issue anymore, at least not to me, and I know if you bump into a problem, there are a million ways to work around this quite easily. Just read around the forum.

diamondjim: Lap-Tops are good for field recording. And I nearly bought the 15,4" version, but then I found the money for the 17" screen and just went ahead and got the 17"one. It's great, but a luxury:) However, I don't think I could go back to anything smaller.

The buildt in Audio on the 9300 has a sub. It's insane, a 1" sub. Great sound, but the soundcard is useless to any serious audio work. MAybe some DV editing and mucking around but that's it, in my oppinion. I also use the lap-top with an Echo Indigo DJ PCMCIA card so I can send clicks and sequences to my drummers ears and all the sequences to the PA separately. Every now and then I use the card for "mixing on the move". It's perfect in my band situation.

Very true indeed. For a lap-top it's great sound to it. It's not bad watching a DVD on it with that sound when you're on a cabin trip to the mountains either:)

However, it's hopeless to get Sonar to work on it. It won't accept the drivers or something. But it just forces me to use a decent audio interface instead, which isn't a bad thing. Fruityloops and SF are ok on it, tho.

I managed to record some rain directly to the Sigmatel it with a batery powered condensator mic I don't know anything about, but with great result. Not too much noise actually, but I am curios to the noise level when using a dynamic mic.

In my experience, Alienware kicks some pretty serious butt. Check them out. Their quality is tops, and their prices are much better than they used to be.

www.alienwre.com

Losguy: I have read somewhere on the forum that you can actually make Sonar work with the Sigmatel and Asio4all at 48KHz if you really want to. It could be usefull. I haven't tried it my self since I have the Echo Indigo, but you never know when built -in speakers come handy

dewdman: I am just curious, but why do you avoid Dell? I have nothing but good experience with Dell as a DAW machine, both lap-tops and desktops. And the same goes for HP. I reckon they're both great off-the-shelf brands. But like you said, there are so many options and I am sure that for every user you get different results with the same machines. I know I always back away from Compaq machines. They keep messing things up for me (and off course I blame the computer!!!)

I thought Sonar could work with nearly any driver type. What could be wrong with the Sigmatel then? I thought the incompatibility issue had to do with other things and therefore needed something like Asio4all?

dewdman: I am just curious, but why do you avoid Dell? I have nothing but good experience with Dell as a DAW machine, both lap-tops and desktops. And the same goes for HP. I reckon they're both great off-the-shelf brands. But like you said, there are so many options and I am sure that for every user you get different results with the same machines. I know I always back away from Compaq machines. They keep messing things up for me (and off course I blame the computer!!!)

well don't get me wrong, I bought a Dell for my mom and dad. I reccomend Dell for most people. For the money its hard to go wrong with a Dell computer *IF* you reformat the HD and reinstall XP from scratch your way instead of the Dell way, which is loaded with support crap and marketing crap that is all borderline spyware. But their stuff is about as cheap as you can get...and generally solid for the money.

My main gripe with Dell is that they tend to use proprietary parts, and it usually comes down making it difficult to replace things, except from Dell. Also hard to get drivers sometimes.

Speaking of laptops, my friend got that high end Dell laptop that is designed for gaming, etc.. His intent was to use it for music. Turns out you cannot get the WDM driver for that laptop, the driver is only available from Dell and Dell only provides the status quo MME driver. He tried and tried and tried and could never really get Sonar to work with the built in soundcard on that computer. Now that being said...I hear stories from people with HPs that are frustrated about not being to get good audo performance from the cardbus soundcard. So pick your poison. I picked my HP laptop because at the time, I read a bunch of reviews and it stacked up better in that price/feature range than any others, including Toshiba, Dell, IBM, etc.. The game is contantly changing though. I don't use cardbus either and I've had zero problems. Also the form factor of my HP is much thinner than any dells I've seen. I actually did consider a Dell laptop as well for a while, but I can't remember the reasons now that it was eliminated.

But my feelings about Dell have more to do with a general feeling that they tend to do tricks to make their stuff cost less and those tricks usually involve proprietary parts. I avoid their desktops like the plaque. I would much rather build my own PC using exactly the motherboard, cpu, vid card, etc. that I want. Their laptops are probably on par with any of the other laptops...ALL of whom use proprietary parts to build up their machines. At that point you just gotta read the reviews and try to find other users who are actually using laptops for audio production to make sure its going to work for you. make sure you're going to find good support. ANother reason I chose my HP was because there is a super good 3rd party forum for this exact model of laptop with thousands of posts and info about supporting it. It far exceeds any support offered from Dell or HP. That was also a key factor for me. I found out everything I needed to know to make my laptop rip from that forum. Maybe you can find something similar for your Dell laptop.