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Looper's Delight
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Kim, Thanks for that post (reprinted below)................you are so correct. I laughed out loud when I read "If you are building a performance PC and you don't understand these things, you might as well turn the lights out and throw darts at the dell catalog." I have a dell that I love to throw darts at. Of course, as Kim so accurately points out, everything in your system (motherboard,chipset, cpu, ram, peripherals, sound card, etc., etc.) has to work together so it's not a simple answer. I tore my hair out the first year that I was trying to compose on a computer with cheapo parts that didn't want to talk with each other..............enough so that my wife asked, "why don't we just give up and get a Mac............lol". I then invested in a more powerful Dell and struck out a second time. The third time I struck gold and had a good friend of mine , Daniel Thomas who is very sophisticated with PC recording studio setups (and has about four CDs that he's produced make it onto the world music charts in the past three years) custom build me my last computer (which is really amazing and trouble free so far). He did it relatively inexpensively (about $700) but I already had monitors,keyboards, CD players and a few other things that he cannibalized from my old system. I know that he took great care, specifically , in picking out an appropriate chipset and motherboard that use the new hyperthreading technology. I'll see if I can get his recommendations for what to buy if he were to build something right now and post them for anyone who is interested. This is on the PC side. I imagine that if you bought a dual processor G5 with maximum CPU speed and a good MOTU audio interface that you could probaby be humming in the first week of owning the system. Just be prepared to lay out $3,000-$4,500 for such a system. Also, regarding Athlon processors, the latest issue of Future Music (which is a UK magazine that seems pretty spot on regarding computer music recommendations) says that the Athlons have come a long way since the days when the conventional wisdom was that you should eschew one for a Pentium. I honestly wish that the hardware looping world would continue to progress with the times. As Kim has pointed out in the past, it is so much more efficient to have a closed architecture system that is designed specifically for the task and works straight out of the box. Unfortunately, this just doesn't seem to be happening and, unless Gibson, announces that they will keep manufacturing the EDP, we will soon get to the point where there will no longer be a midi syncable live looping hardware box that will be available brand new----with used ones topping the $1,000 range quickly, the way the Repeater has. It's concievable that we just don't have the numbers to make a live looping box viable economically so I imagine that, imperfect as it is, the future of this movement technologically will be in software developement which is cheaper to develop (sans the hardware manufacturing costs). Of course, the future of the musical incarnation of live looping techniques will be a mixture of the artists using the new software apps and the artists who own the cool 'retro' gear, like most of us. Witness what Max Valentino is doing with a couple of suped up Lexicon Jammans. yours, rick kim wrote: it is far more complicated than that.... Which Athlon? (or which Pentium?) Which chipset? (this probably matters even more than the cpu.) which motherboard? what memory is installed? what is the FSB speed? what is the memory speed? cas latency? which hard disk? which ATA interface? ATA100? ATA133? SATA? which graphics chip? standalone? integrated? AGP 1x? 4x? 8x? PCI express? what peripherals are installed? how do the all various peripherals load the busses? do the peripherals add to cpu load or offload it? which bios? which drivers? versions? etc, etc, etc. If you are building a performance PC and you don't understand these things, you might as well turn the lights out and throw darts at the dell catalog. If you are interested in performance, there are a lot more variables than the cpu. And there is far more below the hood that affects you than what you see looking at the windows desktop. Going for the cheapest hardware can mean a huge compromise if you don't know what you really need. No version of windows can save you if the hardware isn't up to it. (Be prepared to spend a whole bunch of time at anandtech, tomshardware, etc to figure it out....) >good thing about the mac is that you quickly find out which one you need :-) even there, do you understand the difference between G4 and G5? DDR memory versus SDR? DDR FSB? Dual CPU? single? etc? There are many less choices, but still plenty of ways to go wrong. >>Next desktop for me will be G5 whenever I get around to it (not soon). Next >>notebook is either TabletPC or a G4, prolly G4. > >yeah, a tabletPC would be perfect for stage! but do they have the >necessary features and price?