RE: Looping with a PC laptop... which one?

["Jonathan" <ssrndpty@hotmail.com>]

Another issue to keep in mind with laptops - they are built for road
abuse. Your home pc is built to sit in a corner.

Jon


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Barrs [mailto:mbarrs@nightviewer.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 4:14 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: RE: Looping with a PC laptop... which one?


> From: Alan Kroeger [mailto:nospam@developsolutions.com]

>
> I wanted to reply to this topic for a few days but, my email provider 
> changed some of my settings without letting me know (problem resolved)

> Alright I wanted to suggest the alternative of using a desktop instead

> of a laptop. Laptops are almost always obsolete by the time you get
> them and are
> a real pain as far as upgrading is concerned. I haven't really tried
this
> but am giving serious consideration to doing this I have some
> concerns about
> electrical noise and such. I suppose I could put it in it's own rack
that
> might isolate some of the electrical interferance issues.

I use a rackmount Carillon in my home recording studio:

http://www.carillonusa.com/

Very solid, very stable. I've had mine for a year and a half with zero
problems. Kinda heavy though. Close to dead silent (although that
wouldn't matter so much for live gigs). It's sitting just below a
rackmount unit that has my recording A/D and D/A converters, and I'm
getting no RF leakage at all. You'd want to use it with an LCD screen,
otherwise a CRT will generate too much RF.

That said, if I was putting together a live rig with a computer and
didn't have cartage, so I had to schlep everything myself, I'd
definitely go with a laptop rig for the light weight, compact size, and
integrated display. Rackmount PC's only make sense to me for maybe big
stadium shows, or permanent installations. Laptops are powerful enough
now, and you can get nice (but expensive) interfaces like the RME stuff
for extremely low latency. I've used an older laptop (IBM Thinkpad) for
several years in an astronomy hobby where we dragged it out into remote
outdoor locations, usually getting it covered with dew before the night
was over. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. If it can survive
that, it can survive live gigging... although if I was getting *paid* to
gig, I'd have another laptop as a backup.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention the Carillon in case anyone is thinking
rackmount. This is more expensive than putting one together yourself,
but it's a great off-the-shelf solution. I got one of their bare bones
models (PC Cores) to hold the price down.

Mike Barrs