tlw
Steev
Thunderbolt is excellent on Intel i7 based systems with Z87 chipsets, but kind of a crap shoot with AMD based systems with FX 990 chipsets.
On my system using a Focusrite Clarett plugged into an ASUS Thunderbolt PCIe card, one day it would scream heavenly and flawlessly, the next day when I booted up my computer my BIOS would even recognize it and I'd have to walk through Hell and go through a Voodoo dance to get it up and running again.
However the Focusrite Scarlett Gen 2 series achieves near Thunderbolt ultra low latency through USB 2 on the same system, and hooks up seamlessly to my first gen Focusrite OctoPre with ADAT optical and Word Clock, and I can have a real nice trouble free day with insane amounts of connectivity with an added bonus of 16 Focusrite really delicious sounding Focusrite preamps.
Thunderbolt offers little to no latency improvement over USB. Because USB2 has more than adequate bandwidth and speed. As does Firewire 400 for most purposes.
My UFX returns identical latency and performance through it's USB2 and FW400 ports into my i7 2.2GHz Retina MacBook Pro and the same performance into the USB ports of the now too tempremental to use reliably PC in my sig. That's Firewire into a Thunderbolt 2 port because the MacBook doesn't have firewire ports and hasn't for a while.
Once you're down to 10ms round trip latency matters very little, once reliably down to 32 samples you'll never notice any further improvement even if it can be done technologically. That's the kind of figures where you can add fifty percent to the latency by leaning back on your chair a foot.
As for Logic Pro, I've been using it a lot over the last 18 months because I don't intend building a Won10 PC just to be a DAW, and every other computer we have is Apple apart from an old PC that runs a minimalist Linux server. Logic's good, but give me the way Sonar handles routing multiple hardware MIDI ports any day.
Sonar Platinum comes with a much better set of plugins as well, with the exception perhaps of Alchemy, if you like Alchemy that is. And Sonar has a much better forum :-)
I have to concede with everything. Alchemy is ultra cool. and Macs generally do exactly what you would expect from them, and generally do it very well.
I am more then confident that my 2012 Mac is ULTRA reliable and won't crash Pro Tools 8. and will also be the Swiss Army Knife of DAWs as long as I don't try to upgrade anything
But that isn't even 1/10 what you can do with a decent Windows [workstation grade] machine for half the investment running SONAR 8.5.
I'm not talking about BIG BOX store BLOWOUT sale computerz or trying to appreciate what a DAW actually CAN DO or really what it can't do running on a laptop.
Ok, I'm kinda curious about this new hybrid Tascam interface for SONAR Pro.. Can it keep up to what my Scarlett 18i20/ OctoPre can do with SONAR Platinum?
Is exactly 16 audio tracks at once with at least as many MIDI tracks with hardware and VSTi and or DXi soft synths (or more) and get it down with no humanly detectable latency?
Cakewalk/Roland TTS1 is still one of me all time favorites for that 80's/90's sound canvas (yes pun intended)
Spoiler alert; I won't be spending $300 to find out. ( I'd rather forget I even tried them than mention my personal experiences with Tascam multi-track audio interfaces.
LOVED my DA-88's though, and had several Porta Studios that kept me sane during the off hours. :o)))