A Fundamental Question behind all my Questions

Hi Folks,

Like (I would guess) many here, I no doubt have a bit of Spinal Tap in me. When it comes to either buying or building a DAW, I want the one that "goes to 11." I know what I want my future DAW to be able to do, that much is simple: Playing on 2 midi controllers (one for piano hammer action, and a softer keybed for emulating non percussive-like voices,) to compose/play/record in an entirely soft-based environment; to be able to generously execute the rapidly expanding library of virtual sounds and sonic effects through Sonar, and to do so without experiencing performance overloads and drop-offs. Excepting a vocal mic, nothing need transpire through the actual physical air of my little apartment at all.

Looking at tech specs, customizing at rig sites, and reading other peoples' comments and set-ups is kind of fun, but is driving me nuts. How do I really "know" anything when I learn something? For example, P43.6 is obviously "better" than 3.2, or 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM (EEC) is "better" than 533MHz, DDR2 SDRAM (NEEC) etc., but for a Joe Average working stiff like me on a budget, how can I really "know" where the potentially affordable sweet spot is? Would it be better to save for a couple of months and get the duel-core? What about hyperthreading? At what point do features amount to hype and overkill? What happens when you give a 64 bit can of gas and a match to a guy with a 32 bit brain? Or vice versa?

I absolutely cannot even BEGIN to think about RAID 0 vs. RAID 1 and compose music at the same time.

And of course everyones' particular needs are different, too. What may be useless for me (8 midi I/Os) may be essential for you.
So how can I learn what it is that I really can both afford and use, and how would I know it when I see it?


Michael

Part of me is just ranting because I got my Sonar 5PE upgrade from 3SE in the mail, but the retailer sent me 5SE by mistake, and they're going to fix it for me by overnight express just as soon as they get more Producer copy they think maybe it should be tomorrow or sometime... Hey, if this was a major problem I'd be one very lucky person, but still, I was all hyped up to dig into the upgrade.

I recommend building your own unit. Get a large case with many slots for various hardware cards. I run a UAD DSP plus a firewire video capture board plus, well a lot of other stuff. This approach will allow you to swap out motherboards and processors on the cheap, less than $300 maybe even $200 when you want to upgrade.

Not to start a religious war but I have and use both Intel and AMD based motherboards, go with Intel. I have more driver issues and downtime on the AMD but, when its running right, I get a slight performance boost over the Intel. Stability however is your friend that's why I recommend Intel.

Dual processing is fine but there are instances when two processors actually can operate slower than a single processor. This is because not a lot of software is properly tuned for dual processor usage. Your call here.

64 bit - Wait until next year or the year after if you want to maintain your sanity. Few soundcard drivers are at a stable 64 bit operational level. When 64 bit has been shaken out a little more you can always pick up a new Motherboard and go that direction.

RAID is for high volume studios or people that need an ego boost. The average home recordist doesn't need raid. A dedicated audio drive yes. It does offer better recovery in case of disaster but with 100GB drives under $100, you can buy two and do a backup at the end of a session. My humble opinion, others will vary.

The only key peice of advice I would offer is to buy the fastest processor you can afford. With the advent of soft synths, you will want all the engine power you can pay for. Oh, and buy as much RAM as you can afford. 1GB is getting to be standard these days. 2GB is better.

An Intel with a “4400” handle – hmm. I don’t mean to be snicky, but when I see $2,800 and $4,300 dollar DAW’s offered with Soundblaster and Realtec AC’97 cards I tend to keep looking. Not saying they are bad though, exactly. I think you can do better for your money though. PCI-e has also been known to cause some people grief, but maybe they fixed that. There are two sides to most coins though, and I’d say check out what Intel fans say too. Some of what I’ve heard and read in the forums is that they run hotter, and have infrequent spikes now and then. In my reading, their architecture, registers, and memory management seems overly complex, and I am a simple guy. I also like the idea of upgrades that just require the CPU, and not CPU + motherboard, with newer requisite chips. Talk to as many actual DAW builders as you can, and compare what their advice is. I’m just a hobbyist. I would encourage you to build your own as well. I think you could get far more machine, Intel or AMD, for your money, and it really isn’t that hard to put them together.

Best luck to you,

kellog

ORIGINAL: Zlartibartfast

Quasar - these go to 11, Fer Shure: Boxx

Just 5540 bucks for the advanced system? This looks like a bargain!

I appreciate all the interesting and intelligent replies. So many cool thoughts. Thanks much.

(OT: Hey Kellog, you really should see Rob Reiner's 1984 dead-on, hilarious satire of a "rockumentory" called This is Spinal Tap. It had me doubling over, anyway. The Corsair link, among the others, was great, too. It breaks down to my level!)

This much I think "know" about about my potential DAW:

1) 2GB of at least 3200 PC-level RAM. Some of the softsynth/libraries I'm looking at, and Garritan Personal Orchestra which I own require a MINIMUM of 1GB. Also, for the 64 bit future, the memory support should be expandable.

2) The fastest CPU (whether Intel or AMD) that I can afford, the sweet spot here being last week's BIG BREAKTHROUGH, but now reasonably priced as it's no longer "bleeding edge." Again, 64 possible? Yes. Don't want to have to do this again when tomorrow becomes today.

3) Duel or RAID? Nah. For my humble home studio purposes, two 7200 SATA or IDE HDs, (maybe 80GB system and 250GB audio) should be fine. Boxx looks kind of pricey, and it's probably the duel core stuff? It certainly isn't the Audigy. But I believe it would go to 11, fer shure.

4) PSU and Cooling: 450W and something akin to Antec Sonata. Why? Because different people who sound highly knowledgable and credible keep saying that.

5) MB and Graphics? Clueless. (Asus etc. I'm sure would be fine.) MB should just work with the above, and I merely need to be able to read the small print and see all the little virtual keys, buttons, knobs, and faders with a video card that's as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. I've read that gaming rigs are loud, and that advanced graphics would be- for a DAW- pointlessly resource intensive.

6) Internet or Home Intranet? No. I can download whatever with my gen purpose Dell, AV scan & burn. Simple like that.

7) Buy or build? I like everything about building: The fun, the learning curve, the absence of anything proprietary, OEM etc., EXCEPT this: I'm not tech savvy, have limited $, and literally can't afford to #### this one up. Half of me says: If I do my homework, be careful, avail myself of the help on forums like this... but the other half says: While I might be enchanted by the by the idea of the building process, I really just want to make music. I'm thinking about a Precision 380, maybe, or several places like adkproaudio, but I'm torn in half.

Calaverasgrandes, your comment on drivers and hardware is interesting. I know that my Delta 66 only gives me low latency with Sonar 3SE and DXi or VSTis when I use a certain ASIO driver. But when I open Adobe Audition- which doesn't support ASIO- as a plug through Sonar it works just fine, too. I suppose it must be WDM, but I'm not sure. I don't understand drivers, except that if you install a bad one your computer goes into temporary cardiac arrest.

Hope I'm at least thinking on a right track. If I'm seriously wrong or flawed, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

Michael

Hey kellog,

A discussion about drivers would be cool. All I know about my Delta 66 driver is that it's "digitally unsigned" and Windows yells at you and threatens you when you try to install it, but you just bravely do it anyway anmd then it works fine. Then you can open up a soft synth and find all these driver options... haven't even messed with it for a long time because I don't want to ruin what I've got. I just remember that there was one ASIO that worked pretty well, and I have 5ms- I think- of latency.

You ever find your 49 key controller? Let us know how it works out.

Michael

Howdy Michael. Yeah, I think I’ll get an E-MU 49 X board, but haven’t had time to check them out. Seems like a good deal though.

The only drivers I’m aware of are WDM and ASIO – there is ASIO 2 now also, but I need to research this. So, I was curious when people start mentioning using different drivers and performance. I have almost no experience with soft synths at all, and I’m sure I was using WDM at the time. I’ll have to wait until I get back to my other machines so I can install my 1010 card I suppose. What options are you seeing in your soft synth menus? The driver install for M-Audio has always been non-certified as long as I can remember. I believe I was using it with MME in Windows 98 at first.

Card driver issues I was mentioning (and had little considered before) were about Tascam’s US-122, which I hear crash often for Cakewalk users – not all though. Steering clear from that hassle, and USB in general has a bad rap in driver speak, I was looking at a Firewire interface, which gets good feedback. I had settled on the Presonus Firebox, until Presonus says it has driver problems with ATI chipsets, mostly 9000’s and such – mine is a ATI Radeon IGP 320M. So now I have to check to see about that not working. I’d like to find an audio card that won’t crash, click, or pop, and would allow me to record two tracks of audio with my eMachines M5305. It doesn’t do too bad for most stuff, but it is a humble box. I was just hoping to use it for sketches, light editing, and recording at the coffee house. I’ll have to get an ASUS I guess. What a pain. I’ll go study up on drivers now…

Take care!

kellog