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Cash to burn advice on system lads....

  • 15-07-2003 6:40pm
    #1
    retneil
    Closed Accounts Posts: 119 ✭✭


    Hi All,

    I am looking for a system for sound recording that can do both midi and audio.

    Basically a whole system from scratch that i can put together myself that is very good for sound recording. Any advice lads on what specification to get for this system.

    Anyone else doing sound-recording out there for a bit of rock and roll... Something with **** hot producing capabilities.. Need to know what hard drive spec is best any thought's..?

    thx...


Comments

  • #2
    Gerry
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,457 ✭✭✭Gerry


    I've built 2 systems like this before, specifically for recording. One was on a tight budget, and was a nightmare, the other was sweet.

    Heres a few tips.

    1. Don't get a via chipset. Professional audio cards expect a lot from the pci bus in your machine, and the via chipsets just aren't up to it. They are slowly improving, but still inferior to intel ( and even sis in this regard ). With my nightmare machine, it took ages to get rid of the crackling. I had to use every driver, hack and crack I could find. Makes for a nightmare when reinstalling.

    Buy an intel chipset if you are getting a p4 ( which I'd recommend, a lot of professional audio programs are getting optimized for the p4, and the p4 is basically the best at encoding. Processing large amounts of data is what its good at.
    I'd go for an i865 dual ddr board, with at least 1 gig of ddr.
    Check also if the board is "prescott" compatible. This is an upcoming version of the p4, which will go to 4 or 5ghz.

    If you feel that you have to get an amd machine, go for the nforce2 chipset, and disable the onboard audio.

    2. Ensure you get a quiet fan for your cpu. The intel retail cpu cooler is pretty quiet, there are quieter though. A big heatsink with a slow running 80mm fan is ideal, it cools better than a smaller, faster, louder fan. Post up the details here beforehand anyhow. You can add insulation to the sides of the case, but you will need more fans to get rid of the heat. You can buy quiet fans and run them slow to basically create a silent machine.

    3. Hard drives, I don't think you need the fastest there is for audio, most drives these days are capable of 25 megabytes writing and twice that reading. If you run out of memory while processing, hard drive speed will make a difference, but far better just to get more ram. Don't get 2 gigs straight off unless you are loaded, see how you go and keep an eye on memory usage.
    Taking this into account, the quietest ide drive around is the seagate barracuda.
    It may be an idea to get 2 drives, 1 for windows and non audio stuff, the other for scratch space. Put them on different ide channels. I did this on the more expensive machine ( 2 80 gig IBM's ) and it worked a treat.

    4. CPU
    Get the fastest you can afford, but probably not worth going for the top end model. Find the fastest chip with a reasonable price to mhz ratio. You could always clock it up later.

    5. Sound cards.

    Don't know that much about them, but I do know that the creative cards are absolutely rubbish for anything serious. The chip is good, but the rest of the card ( filters, outputs ) are rubbish. Theres another card based on the same chip which is far better, can't remember what it is though. Look at www.tomshardware.com for some excellent articles on sound cards.

    6. Misc

    You may have to go through a process of elimination for noise/interference. But we'll wait till you get the machine for that.


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