2.7Ghz or 3.1Ghz CPU?

[slaughteredlamb]

It would be interesting to hear the opinion of a system builder who specialises in audio PCs.

That'll be me then 

To be honest there's audio and there's audio. For the Pro or Semi Pro the days of the 'traditional' soundcard are largely over as it's now Firewire and USB interfaces which offer the kind of features and functionality often not found on the more traditional soundcard. The use of these interfaces largely removes the problems with latency in terms of hardware induced latency and all of them will use very low latency drivers such as ASIO and the like. Therefore the difference between PC's and Macs is largely minimal. This though isn't the complete story. Most Firewire/USB interfaces only have a certain amount of DSP power and so for certain things it may be required to bus the audio from the interface to the host computer for processing before bussing it back to the Interface to be heard and this is where latency caused by software and computer hardware can come in. PC's are definitely worse at this than Mac's but it would not be fair to say that they are bad. An audio PC, correctly set-up by someone who understands the chipsets used and which ones to avoid in combination with certain interfaces can largely eliminate or at least greatly reduce these problems and more importantly a lot of this is down to the individual Digital Audio Workstation software and how that works. Again though this is where, in very general terms, Mac's are better but that's not necessarily fair because most of the DAW programs for the Mac are aimed more towards the Professional whereas there are hundreds more for the PC aimed at everyone from Mr. Numpty to Mr. Professional.

For the non pro, someone who just wants to do 'basic' recording and mixing using whatever soundcard is in their computer then generally speaking Mac's are better due to the inherent low latency of the sound card, drivers, and the host computer itself and also the operating system used.

Windows is a bit of a nightmare OS for audio work in that there are so many things you should disable, adjust, enable etc in order to get the best audio possible. This was particularly true of Windows 9x, XP (2000 and ME where practically unusable for audio) and Vista was just shunned universally. Windows 7 is a lot better but largely because now it works more like OSX. As a side note I used to be the European Product Specialist for a manufacturer of professional Digital Audio Workstations using dedicated hardware and software and rather than use Windows we ended up developing our own operating system called AudioOS which was based loosely around DOS because Windows was just too disruptive and slow. Due to the way OSX works it is simply better for audio as it really doesn't need any tweaking out of the box and because it's far more efficient than Windows (pre Windows 7) there is less chance of it interrupting any audio processing.

Well, you did ask! 

[robwhizz]

Well, you did ask! 

It's interesting stuff to be honest and makes a lot of sense when you consider that Macs come from a background of completely bespoke all-in-one design, whereas the PC is an evolution that takes years to shed legacy support. It's only really in the last few years with 64-bit chips and decent 64-bit OSes that hardware vendors have been able to push the PC forward with fewer compromises.

[slaughteredlamb]

Well, you did ask!  

It's interesting stuff to be honest and makes a lot of sense when you consider that Macs come from a background of completely bespoke all-in-one design, whereas the PC is an evolution that takes years to shed legacy support. It's only really in the last few years with 64-bit chips and decent 64-bit OSes that hardware vendors have been able to push the PC forward with fewer compromises.

It is a question that gets asked a lot in the audio field but one that there isn't a definitive answer for because there are so many variables. It's almost impossible to do a direct comparison between Macs & PC's in this, or probably, any regard.

For example.

If you had a PC running with a USB Interface with lots of on board DSP power using ASIO (or similar) drivers (with a few of the obvious things turned off in Windows) then it is going to perform perfectly. However you then start using plugins and the story changes. If you use native plugins (native to the DAW you are using) then you'll be fine unless you are using tons and tons, use VST plugins and you'll almost certainly be fine, use either of these combined with just one DirectX plugin and it could all go to pot because DirectX is processed by the host PC and it's hugely inefficient. This means that the DAW has to process the audio on the Interface for Native plugins (and possibly VST) before bussing it to the host PC for DirectX processing and then bussing it back to the Interface to process with other plugins or to be heard.


The Mac doesnt have the problem of DirectX but then it also means it doesnt have access to much cheaper plugins and potentially means that you need to buy more expensive interfaces with larger DSP chips. This will mean that it will work better but it will cost you more.

The use of either 32bit or 64bit OS's isn't actually that relevant when it comes to audio other than the potential speed that the OS can operate (assuming the hardware is up to it). What is more relevant is how the OS can allocate resources to individual programs, allow a program to crash without affecting another etc and this is where OSX excelled over Windows up to the release of Windows 7. I still think that OSX is better than Windows 7 in this regard but in all honesty I've not had enough experience of Windows 7 in an audio capacity to say for sure but it's certainly the impression that I've got from my limited experience and from talks with others.

[familychoice]

The use of these interfaces largely removes the problems with latency in terms of hardware induced latency and all of them will use very low latency drivers such as ASIO and the like. Therefore the difference between PC's and Macs is largely minimal.

I've spent years trying to configure PC's to get them to play nicely with audio. Yes, some audio interfaces will have their own built in hardware and software methods to improve latency and quality but a lot don't. For example I'm using Native Instruments Maschine which is a lovely piece of kit but doesn't offer any additional sound enhancements. So to reduce the insane latency of my onboard sound card (hit a pad on the controller and you'll hear a sample played a couple of seconds later) I have to use the ASIO4all driver.

It does the job - brilliant. But it's quirky, and unreliable and regularly 'loses' it's settings so I have to keep restarting and re-inputting the settings.

Last month I decided to add a USB mic to my set-up. Nightmare. I then had two pieces of hardware using the ASIO4all driver and it would randomly forget the settings to one or both pieces of hardware, so in the end I had to send the mic back. Then there's plug-ins - which reduce the system to jelly, and the range of onboard soundcard drivers that Dell install to make things even more confusing.

By contrast a similar set up on the Macbook Pro worked straight out of the box with no fannying about, despite having a lower general spec than the PC I'm using now.

My own experience is that the difference is a bit more than minimal.

I'm hoping to play my set-up live, but I wouldn't be able to do it via my PC laptop, the free drivers are just too unreliable - I can't keep stopping mid-song to reconfigure the drivers, people would get cross.

The characters do seem to stay there even if the keyboard is showing signs of wear, the main problem I have with them is the appearance after a while, they don't half start to look grubby, and are a real pain to clean - especially when you have a dozen of the feckin things.

I noticed that on the Macbook Pro - they looked really mucky after a couple of days, despite my hands being lovely and clean.

[slaughteredlamb]

The use of these interfaces largely removes the problems with latency in terms of hardware induced latency and all of them will use very low latency drivers such as ASIO and the like. Therefore the difference between PC's and Macs is largely minimal.

I've spent years trying to configure PC's to get them to play nicely with audio. Yes, some audio interfaces will have their own built in hardware and software methods to improve latency and quality but a lot don't. For example I'm using Native Instruments Maschine which is a lovely piece of kit but doesn't offer any additional sound enhancements. So to reduce the insane latency of my onboard sound card (hit a pad on the controller and you'll hear a sample played a couple of seconds later) I have to use the ASIO4all driver.

It does the job - brilliant. But it's quirky, and unreliable and regularly 'loses' it's settings so I have to keep restarting and re-inputting the settings.

Last month I decided to add a USB mic to my set-up. Nightmare. I then had two pieces of hardware using the ASIO4all driver and it would randomly forget the settings to one or both pieces of hardware, so in the end I had to send the mic back. Then there's plug-ins - which reduce the system to jelly, and the range of onboard soundcard drivers that Dell install to make things even more confusing.

By contrast a similar set up on the Macbook Pro worked straight out of the box with no fannying about, despite having a lower general spec than the PC I'm using now.

My own experience is that the difference is a bit more than minimal.

I'm hoping to play my set-up live, but I wouldn't be able to do it via my PC laptop, the free drivers are just too unreliable - I can't keep stopping mid-song to reconfigure the drivers, people would get cross.

The characters do seem to stay there even if the keyboard is showing signs of wear, the main problem I have with them is the appearance after a while, they don't half start to look grubby, and are a real pain to clean - especially when you have a dozen of the feckin things.

I noticed that on the Macbook Pro - they looked really mucky after a couple of days, despite my hands being lovely and clean.

Yeah I'd expect you to have problems with that kit on a PC to be honest. You are talking about a sequencer and sampler which is all handled by the interface but then all the VST plugins are, I believe, largely powered by the host PC which is where latency is going to creep in again (I think if you were able to use RTAS you'd be better off but I may be wrong). IMHO PC's never really implemented USB that well (it's too prone to interruptions and delays from and by the OS), which is also largely why USB has been largely shunned by audio in favour of Firewire. You connect all of that together and your chances of latency are high as it is and quite frankly God help you if you throw Midi at it.

I'm not that familiar with the Native Instruments Maschine but if you are plugging the USB mic into the host PC rather than into the Maschine than, again because I personally think that PC's never really implemented USB that well, I would imagine that you would run into a few problems with a PC. You may find that plugging them into entirely separate USB buses (if your motherboard has this) will resolve/improve this but having the two on the same bus on a PC is too prone to potential issues. Personally I'd never use a USB mic anyway largely over sound quality issues but also because most DAW software expects an audio driver to be an input and output device whereas a mic is obviously purely input and you can (although it is getting better all the time) have problems in setting the mic as an input whilst using another device as the output - frequently resulting in one device either disappearing or not working correctly which sounds very much like what you are experiencing.

[familychoice]

Personally I'd never use a USB mic anyway largely over sound quality issues but also because most DAW software expects an audio driver to be an input and output device whereas a mic is obviously purely input and you can (although it is getting better all the time) have problems in setting the mic as an input whilst using another device as the output - frequently resulting in one device either disappearing or not working correctly which sounds very much like what you are experiencing.

Yeah, I had to send it back. I'm not quite sure why I picked a USB one in the first place, it was asking for trouble really. I usually use a 'normal' audio mic so I'll be replacing it with one of those shortly.

I think my point about the Mac audio capabilities is that any old Joe can buy an iMac for their design job and (I'm assuming the sound is as good as it is on other Macs) have studio quality audio as a bonus without mucking about. They also have the best value DAW available (Logic, Mac only) on the market. OK, so you don't have masses of free (and usually ropey) plugins available but when you can buy Logic for only £140 who needs em?

On the other hand Joe (or me) buying an off the shelf system for work from Dell or the like is not going to enjoy those same audio capabilities without sourcing, installing and configuring a professional audio card. And they'll then need someone like you or Rob to get everything set up and working properly. An audio card wasn't even an option when I bought my Dell 'multimedia' PC, it was onboard sound or onboard sound. I could have shopped around for a purpose built audio workstation but that's missing the point - Macs provide all this as standard.

[robwhizz]

The use of either 32bit or 64bit OS's isn't actually that relevant when it comes to audio other than the potential speed that the OS can operate (assuming the hardware is up to it). What is more relevant is how the OS can allocate resources to individual programs, allow a program to crash without affecting another etc and this is where OSX excelled over Windows up to the release of Windows 7.

Aye. What I meant about 64-bit CPUs was more about ditching older legacy stuff. The original hardware design only allowed for 640K of memory, so when that was broken you ended with extended memory because you couldn't change that base size for compatibility (oh the time spent getting Day of the Tentacle to run from CD!). The achilles heal of the PC has always been the amount of legacy crap that manufacturers have had to retain for backward compatibility which has stopped the PC from becoming streamlined and instead forced many compromises. Although some things have been dropped naturally over time, I think the release of 64-bit CPUs - although causing major headaches to be compatible with 32-OSes - has allowed much more old rubbish to be dropped from the PC. It's this current period that is seeing PCs become far more streamlined and efficient hardware wise. With good 64-bit OSes and 64-bit software the PC should be able to fully develop into a better design. Apple have had things like 64-bit memory addressing without silly memory holes for many years. By not having to support ageing architecture they've had a cleaner, more efficient design.
The proof in the pudding is that Apple always had bespoke hardware, but now they have switched to modified PC based stuff.

[slaughteredlamb]

Yeah very true. On of the first things anyone building a dedicated audio PC does is to disable Legacy support in the BIOS. The thing is, and I've never been able to have this confirmed by anyone but it's the only explanation I can come up with to explain things, I suspect that even when you disable Legacy support in the BIOS Windows still runs as though it is enabled. It just seems to still allocate resources for it, I can't really explain it properly because there aren't any ways of telling that this is what it's doing, at least not that I know of. I think, but again can't prove, this is one (of many) reasons why a PC running Windows will run slower than the same PC running Linux or a Mac of the same spec running OSX.

I think that this is where Mac's are simply better. With Windows Microsoft simply have no idea what hardware the OS will have to power and I suspect that it just defaults to a "Enable Everything!" state. With OSX though Apple know precisely what hardware it will work with as pretty much the only peripherals that will be added will be USB or Firewire and so they can tailor the OS to get the absolute best from the hardware. After all this is the main reason why Macs simply are more reliable than PC's.

Going back to the original topic though, I'm now starting to come down in favour of the 3.1Ghz CPU just because I'm going to get it on finance now and the difference between the two is only a few quid a month. Either way I'm going to max it out with 16GB of RAM afterwards 

[Dom]

Talking of audio PCs, is there anything I should have/do to my PC to make it better in that regard?

The only real use I have (outside of the ordinary stuff like watching films or playing games) is when I record or stream my mixes. I currently just use the on-board sound card as I don't have anything fancy going on inside, soundcard-wise.

I have an RCA-to-3.5mm jack lead going from my mixer into the Line In on the PC, and that seems work OK. I've never found any problems with the basic setup, but I just figured I'd ask as we're on the subject.

I did find that Adobe Audition threw a hissy fit when I first tried to record some audio from the Line In. It was complaining about incoming and outgoing bit rates not matching or something. I changed some settings and got it to work, but it's not something I'd seen before.

[slaughteredlamb]

It's difficult to give exact or more detailed answer without knowing a lot more about your system, for example the order of cards in the PCI slots can have an effect depending on the route of the PCI bus.

In terms of just setting up Windows to get it in the best state for audio a very general guide would be:

Basically disable everything you don't need. Go through every process and disable or set to manual start up anything that isn't required by Windows or for audio. Disable power management, screen savers etc

Dont use your C: drive for audio or for scratch discs. Instead have a separate drive (ideally on a separate bus but not that essential these days with SATA) for recording and playback and for use as scratch discs

Whack in lots of RAM - for non dedicated audio hardware i.e. a built in soundcard I'd say that 8GB was a minimum with Windows 7

Go into your BIOS, disable Legacy Support and things like Wake From LAN - basically you don't want anything to disturb the PC from what it's doing.

Remove any USB and Firewire devices that aren't required for audio.

KILL Anti-Virus Software - The single biggest problem for audio PC's. Most audio applications and hardware simply hate AV software and AV software hates audio software and hardware. At the very least you will need to add exceptions into your AV software typically telling it not to scan the audio drives or scratch discs but you really need to know exactly where your audio software writes files. Many will write temp files to the C: drive, others will write other files like waveform profiles and undo files in other directories and all of these should be excluded too.


There are also things like uninstalling certain Windows Update patches and installing others but these are so system specific as to be impossible to explain here.

[familychoice]

Talking of audio PCs, is there anything I should have/do to my PC to make it better in that regard?

[Dom]

Thanks for the answers! I shall fetch the hammer immediately.


From the sounds of things, I've got my PC set up pretty much how it needs to be. I don't have any USB devices other than a mouse and keyboard; I've got 8Gb of RAM in there (soon to be 16Gb); and the BIOS for my P8P67 Pro motherboard has a lot of old legacy stuff turned off.

Just for info, my PC has an Intel i5-2500K running @ 4.4GHz, and 8Gb DDR3 RAM running @ 1600MHz. The built-in sound card is just the standard one that's built into the P8P67 mobo.

I wasn't looking for anything specific, I just realised when reading this thread that I've given no thought to the sound aspect of my PC at all. I just thought that perhaps I should.

[slaughteredlamb]

I went for the 3.1Ghz version in the end and this is me typing from it.  Tis truly a beautiful thing and goes like the clappers but will benefit from the RAM injection I shall be giving it soon

[familychoice]

I went for the 3.1Ghz version in the end and this is me typing from it.  Tis truly a beautiful thing and goes like the clappers but will benefit from the RAM injection I shall be giving it soon

If the deal's are still as good that'll be me in a couple of years too. I never thought I'd be able to afford a Mac desktop again but they look the business.

[robwhizz]

Can you plug a second monitor into an iMac?

[slaughteredlamb]

Can you plug a second monitor into an iMac?

Yes you can you just need to buy a Mini DisplayPort to VGA/DVI adapter. I used to do this when I first bought an iMac years ago but then found that I really didn't need the second monitor it that much. I also felt that it 'distracted' from the visual simplicity of the iMac and so just ditched it after a few weeks. The 27" screen I have now is so fekking huge that not only do I not have the space for a second screen now, I really would have no use for one at all either. But yes, if you need a second screen you can run one from the iMac

[samhs]

I've got a second screen on my 27" - wouldn't be without it

[robwhizz]

The thing is, and I've never been able to have this confirmed by anyone but it's the only explanation I can come up with to explain things, I suspect that even when you disable Legacy support in the BIOS Windows still runs as though it is enabled. It just seems to still allocate resources for it, I can't really explain it properly because there aren't any ways of telling that this is what it's doing, at least not that I know of. I think, but again can't prove, this is one (of many) reasons why a PC running Windows will run slower than the same PC running Linux or a Mac of the same spec running OSX.

Back in the day of Windows 3 the bios set everything. You could adjust IRQs and had to make sure all your hard disks were set up properly. I'm hazy when it comes to Win98, but I think it was a similar deal (back then boards had proper jumpers anyway, not these lovely soft menus).
Win2K onwards ignore a lot of bios settings. As long as you have your boot drive set up you can disable/not set up all other channels and the OS will still pick up all your disks.
Likewise, you can't set IRQs in bios as windows will automagically do it's own thing (not really a problem now with PCIe and onboard everything, but ISA/PCI/AGP used to require much card juggling to get network card, sound card and graphics card to play nicely on their own IRQs).
So, yes Windows can and does ignore the bios.
That said, it should follow things like disabled audio, RAID etc. I know from experience that disabling certain things stops windows finding them and installing drivers. What might cause problems is where drivers have been installed and then the device is disabled. I never looked too deeply into this so I can't for sure whether it would cause problems...
There might be a lot of level level stuff that windows picks up that can't be disabled but could cause problems.
I'd say it's mostly down to the hardware manufacturers and again Windows trying to make sure it's compatible with older stuff. On my work machine I have a standard floppy controller installed despite floppy disk being disabled in the bios (and not having used one for over 10 years). Graphics card is sharing an IRQ with the IDE controller despite having no devices installed on IDE (they are all on the nForce SATA controller). High Definition Audio bus driver is sharing an IRQ with the network bus enumerator and a SATA controller.
None of this affects my machine as it's just for work, but for audio IRQ sharing is almost definitely going to cause latency because of how the IRQ system works.