PC Studio setup - looking for recommendations (1 Viewer)

[herb]

I'm currently planing to build my own PC studio for music mastering.
I'm in a band and we have limited access to record onto a Roland desk for free.
which we did recently, and we burnt a cd with the 17 wav tracks for each song. Now using Prologic to master the tracks on a PC which I have limited access on. Spent 8 hours just cleaning up the tracks etc., so would lke to get by own PC up and running.

Looking at using a Pentium iii or iv with 256mb plus ram, 7200 rpm hard (may upgrade to SCSI)

Was looking for some advice on soundcards and monitors. Something good enough but not too costly.

Any recommendations.

Thanks a bunch for any advice,

Herb

 

[pete]

uhh i be no expert on recording stuff, but as far as the PC goes i'd go for an AthlonXP cpu rather than a P4, and use the money saved to get more memory & more hard disk space. Realistically, there's no reason to go for less than 512mb and 100gb of disk space these days. There's good prices out there for both - I just ordered another 512mb DIMM for €136 & a 120gb 7200rpm hard drive for €180 from www.komplett.ie. I don't know if i'd bother with SCSI meself - there's very little benefit speed-wise (if any), but i guess the fault tolerance is handy.... If it's any indication, i've had the option of IDE SCSI on the last couple of motherboards in my home PC here, and i've never bothered....

As far as soundcards go, you could get the Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum for €250, and that has all sorts of fancy connectors and shit on a panel that goes into one of the drive bays on the front of your PC, which saves all that poking round the back of the PC malarkey, but i dunno if that's any good for "proper" recording or not. You should probably try to make friends with someone who works for Creative Labs if you're gonna go for one - i hear the staff shop gives amazing discounts. The Extigy (the external version) is pretty nice, but I hear it has some minor USB latency issues for recording?.... like i said i'm no expert.

As far as monitors go, i've been using a 15" digital TFT monitor lately and while the picture is fantastic, it's just not big enough (max resolution is 1024*768).... LIDL had 19" monitors with a max. res of 1600x1200 for some stupidly low price recently (€150 or so) , but komplett have 19" LG monitors for about €280, so they could be worth a look.


Hope this helps.

 

[herb]

Thanks for your reply.

I've actually being advised not to get and Athlon chips that Pro Logic will not support it, else your system will crash all the time.
Some one out there may know if this is true or false but I can get the Pentium Pc quite cheap anyway.

Ohh and sorry about the monitor, I meant as the speaker monitor, they really need to be high quality for when mixing, perhaps a good headset will do instead and I'll just use by stereo speakers.

And memory cost are such an issue aswell, depending on what type of board I get 512mb can cost from 60 euro to 200 euro, man all these headaches. So I'm not rushing in, just trying to pick up as much info as possible before going ahead.

Thanks for the words

Herb

 

[pete]

Dunno anything about Athlon chips "crashing all the time" - sounds like arse to me. There used to be issues with certain motherboards using certain VIA chipsets a year or two ago, but i'm using an XP2000 CPU on an ABIT AT-7 legacy-free motherboard for about 4 or 5 months now and i've not had any problems.

If you're determined to go for P4 then yes, as far as I know you will probably get royally screwed for memory if you opt for the higher-end of the intel market.

 

[snap-apple]

i know that in the past some applications have claimed that they are designed specifically to work with wintel boxes and suffer some performance loss on athlons.
having said that i know a girl who recently got a new setup for recording stuff:

2.4 GHz Athlon processor
Gigabit 7VAXB motherboard
512 MB RAM 333MHz DDRRAM
Creative Audigy Platinum 2
160 GB IDE hard drive with 8MB cache
32MB GeForce Video Card
+ standard cdrw/dvd/

cost roughly €1400

and in her music tech course they use athlon based PCs.
confused? tempted? i am.
currently still on my 4 year old P2 400 and need to upgrade i reckon if i want to have a good home recording setup (and to play the new Championship Manager)

 

[herb]

Pete your right, the higher end Intel the more expensive the memory etc., something to think about.

The PC spec above seems really good, but I ain't got that much to spend. I could build it myself cheaper, I work in the computer trade at the moment.

Another thing is the creative soundcard is used again, surely it can't be pro hardware? It most be then if its in the setup above.
Is that setup designed especially for a studio in mind or just a high spec.

I always persumed Creative cards where for games etc.,

I'm just really looking for coax in/out left/right and a digital out/in.

Man this topic has got technical

Herb

 

[snap-apple]

reckon its a home recording setup - info on the sound card at:
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&AvdID=1&CatID=16&GrpID=&p=28264&t=&l=&view=related

also that 8MB Hard drive cache is apparently hard to come by but presumably improves hard drive performace for audio recording and playback.

 

[pete]

yeah the 8mb cache will definitely speed things up.... the 120gb drive i got doesn't have that much, and i was tempted to shell out more for the bigger cache, but seeing as the 2 drives i have already do 30mb/sec i reckon i'll be ok with this one....

 

[snap-apple]

Originally posted by pete
but seeing as the 2 drives i have already do 30mb/sec i reckon i'll be ok with this one....

show-off
tell me - i know nahting about hard drive speeds and cache - does the OS have any impact on the performance - i.e. what's the limiting factor?
i get paid to talk like this. its great.

 

[nine]

Originally posted by pete

The Extigy (the external version) is pretty nice, but I hear it has some minor USB latency issues for recording?.... like i said i'm no expert.

well i'm a psuedo expert because i bought the thing.
My opinion:for music making/production it's pants.The main problem with it is that at the moment it is not ASIO compatible,which means it's dead in the water when it comes to Cubase.Don't know about Pro-Logic.The extigy to me seems a toy for people with laptops who want a "cool" looking soundcard.It does look cool,and it has Dolby surround,but in terms of production i would steer clear.
I sold it and bought the ordinary Audigy 1,which is fine for me.As pete and conor said,the Audigy 2 Platinum is your best bet.Or check out M-Audio,they're more expensive but geared for musicians rather than games and movies.

 

[pete]

Originally posted by conor
show-off
tell me - i know nahting about hard drive speeds and cache - does the OS have any impact on the performance - i.e. what's the limiting factor?

Hmmm not that I know of - it's more down to the motherboard & what version of ATA / Ultra ATA it supports. My 40 & 60gb drives are both Ultra ATA 100, and I get speeds up to 30mb/sec. The new 120gb drive is Ultra ATA 133 and it reads at 47.5mb/sec and writes at 29mb/sec... although that'd probably be faster if i didn't have it on as a slave, and faster again if i'd gone for the 8mb cache one.

I think the next big hike in HD speed will be Serial ATA, which is supposed to be 400mb/sec - how that translates into real-world performance is another thing altogether.

Oh and if anyone is looking for a 4 pin to 4 pin firewire cable, rather than spend €75 in Compustore, Game are selling 3rd party PS2 i-link cables for €2.99 which to the best of my knowledge are the same thing.

 

[pete]

Originally posted by nine
The main problem with it is that at the moment it is not ASIO compatible,which means it's dead in the water when it comes to Cubase.

Aren't there ASIO drivers available for it now? I thought some company was selling them (not Creative Labs)...

 

[nine]

Originally posted by pete
Aren't there ASIO drivers available for it now? I thought some company was selling them (not Creative Labs)...

yeah,there's a site called usbaudio.com (or something like that.They have developed a driver for external sound cards to be asio compatible.However,the last time i checked their site,the only card that it didn't support was the extigy.
Also,kxproject have a driver,but again,the extigy is not supported.

This may have changed since i last checked but it was this way about 3 months ago.

 

[Chocohead]

buy a mac, is the only recommendation. the crt imacs are cheap and come with all the hardware you need to get going

What happened the big electronic show that was meant to take place in september herv? remember? the one that was to be much better than ambientlive? did it ever happen?