There are no PCIe cards for audio but there ARE PCIe cards for firewire 400 and 800 and USB cards so that leaves you open to all the firewire and USB interfaces some of which are fantastic. For 2 in 2 out, I've already suggested the metric halo ULN2 on firewire and the apogee mini me converters for USB, then you have the MH2882 which can be stacked for multi input/output I think up to 128 analogue connections on one machine all through firewire. There are a lot of other options heaps in fact.

The Apogee Rosetta and AD/DA 16X series is something I'm looking at as a high-end solution to this,along with the Dangerous 2-Bus for analogue i/o.PCI-e,per se, is always going to have superior bandwidth to any firewire or USB device.

@PolarBear said:

Beaswax, so far you didn't like any aspect of the VSL but still want to buy into it? I wish you all the best and hope your purchase is well thought-out. But thanks for the offer you are willing to also upgrade my computer [:D] [;)]

More seriously though, they still are running the tests for the hardware requirements, so I doubt you'll get more info until it's confirmed from other people what hardware specs are needed. From what I read, the VIs can be run at least as well as from the computers you are running your current EXS, GS, Kontakt, Halion or whatever on for your VSL samples.

All the best,
PolarBear

I never said that I didn't like any aspect of the VSI. I just thought that the pricing scheme was very unfair (seems like the same samples with a few new ones added). Since I've been doing a lot of jingle work I think that it would be better for me to save time by using the new and improved performance mode. Then it allows me to use DP and Logic freely.

@Beaswax said:

I think that it would be better for me to save time by using the new and improved performance mode.

Yes, and time is money so VSL is going to save you a lot of money and also be able to pay for all the time they spent developing this new product and samples. Also it will help them pay for the next cool thing we all want so we can sound better and make more money in less time, and...

Just wondering if anybody received their Quad yet (if you ordered one [:)] ) and would have any early advice to give?

Mine just came in today! [:D]

@Beaswax said:

I think that it would be better for me to save time by using the new and improved performance mode.

Yes, and time is money so VSL is going to save you a lot of money and also be able to pay for all the time they spent developing this new product and samples. Also it will help them pay for the next cool thing we all want so we can sound better and make more money in less time, and...

Well hopefully by that time they'll have a real VIP program....

Hi guys,

I've been trying to find some kind of performance-test results on the new quad-core macs because I still have a dual-1ghz machine, and it's time to upgrade. But all the benchmark tests conspicuously don't mention how the new machines work with audio - just photoshop and final cut.

Has anyone found some real-world results of a dual-2.7ghz G5 vs. a quad-core 2.5ghz G5 running Logic?

Kerry

@PaulR said:

... but I would not like to think people are ordering this monster only to find that they have a big problem getting any noise out of it.

I'd be surprised if that was the case...

I'm picking up mine today, so I'll try and keep a daily diary on this page of the performance of the Quad, and in Jan. how it's doing with VI.

Hopefully it will be a diary and not diarrhea! [:O]ops:

@PaulR said:

... but I would not like to think people are ordering this monster only to find that they have a big problem getting any noise out of it.

I'd be surprised if that was the case...

I'm picking up mine today, so I'll try and keep a daily diary on this page of the performance of the Quad, and in Jan. how it's doing with VI.


What soundcard did you get?

@PaulR said:

... but I would not like to think people are ordering this monster only to find that they have a big problem getting any noise out of it.

I'd be surprised if that was the case...

I'm picking up mine today, so I'll try and keep a daily diary on this page of the performance of the Quad, and in Jan. how it's doing with VI.


What soundcard did you get?

Paul, I wanted to be careful with that, so I waited the last minute, probably get it in the next few days.

@Guy said:

Paul, I wanted to be careful with that, so I waited the last minute, probably get it in the next few days.

You will proabaly want to look at RME fireface - through the firewire 800 port. If you go that way, I think it might be an idea to get an extra PCIe card - which I think gives you 2 more extra firewire 800 slots.

Although, you could look at a Motu 828 MkII thta is firewire 400.

I could do with some clarification on this now from a technocrat myself, because I'm getting totally confused.

[*-)] [*-)] [*-)] [*-)]

Number one thing to remember if you use a firewire device then you have used up all of the ONE firewire BUS (not port for which there are 3 connected to that one bus). Therefore you WILL need a PCIe card if you want to run firewire drives off your mac for samples, freezes etc. If you don't you greatly increase your risk of crashing (in my experience) ***a lot*** and also greatly reduce the performance of your hard drives. You definately need a PCIe card for extra firewire then you'll get max performance. My advice is to use the FW on your mac for your audio device and use a PCI card for your drives the reason being if you buy a PCI 800 card you can't inadvertently forget and plug an ipod or something into the mac fw400 port and screw up your drives, whereas if you plug in your ipod with your audio interface running it will probably work, or at worst it will crash your system but the point is no danger to your drives as such. If you use a fw400 audio interface (800 seems unnecessary to me) then if you do plug in an ipod you won't have any dramas and can even plug in ONE fw400 drive for backups etc that should not disrupt your interface for general use but that is not recommended when you are using logic as this can still cause crashes in my experience. Bottom line, one device per bus. the mac has ONE bus. a PCI card has ONE bus (even if it has two/three ports). If you buy two PCI cards, you'll have two extra busses. SOME PCI cards are dual BUS (I've heard but never seen one). If they say specifically "4 port 2 bus" it's probably true but I would still check it out. You should probably expect to pay around twice the price as it has double the technology on the card. Having said that fw pci cards are pretty cheap and easy to install, you can add two, giving you enough bandwidth for 4 very fast firewrire 800 drives, two on each bus, plus your audio interface on the mac. two drives raided for sample streaming, and 2 drives raided for audio and freeze tracks, use your second internal drive (if you have one) for backups.

Miklos.

Wise words from a wise person.

Thanks for all that good info Miklos![:D]

My understanding is JBOD will yield superior performance to RAID.

Maybe that is true, but Miklos didn't comment about JBOD or RAID, but over the capabilities of the internal FW800 port in a Mac that theoretically can host quite a number of devices in one chain, but as he said it's not very practical for the abovementioned needs. Seperate controller doesn't always mean RAID, and it seems that you might be better of with a seperate controller for each drive you add from his post.

PolarBear

Yes you may be right for sample streaming with 2 drives but not when you are using SATA with 4 drives or more. Well that is my understanding. Seek times are faster with 2 drives on a JBOD but it's irrelevant with 4 or more drives.

Opinions?

Anyway the above advice still stands, you're better off with SATA 4 disks and JBOD than FW 4 disks and JBOD.

Could somebody please explain what JBOD is? I'm not familiar with this term.

I'm interested in this discussion because the S Cube will require more disk space and I want to make sure I have the best possible system.

Regards - Colin

just want to throw in that the dual cores seem to have two firewire buses internally.

When I connect on fface800 though fw800 and another one through fw400 they run at different speed. (This was also pointed out by a apple guy (on Cubase forum).) But with the fface there was no advantage of one config over another.

So connect your interface to the 800 and your drives to the 400 ports on the dual gives you independent fw-streams.

Best

Well back to the original question. The Performance with the Quad G5 is pretty damned smooth. I got mine a few weeks ago and it's really great. As you'd expect.

Running Logic Pro 7 and at least 50 EXS instances with no problems at all. I have 4 gig of Ram in this machine. The only thing I wish I could do is get more Ram and have logic recognize it, but I'm told that It can only address upto 3.7 gig.

Overall performance. Everything is tweaked, the simplest things open and operate blindingly fast. In fact the only thing I feel that is being a drag on the system is the HD, which is a Western Digital. I believe that Maxtor acheives better read/write benchmarks, and so would be a good improvement to this system.

Over My G4 this thing is just awesome. It's sheer computational power is staggering. And suffice it to say that for my VSL needs a doubt very much that I will want another machine anytime soon. Perhaps just more Ram, A faster HD, and the VI cube to really test it's capabilities.

Hey, here's a thought, how about sending me the VI cube and I'll test it for you [[:D]] Let you know how it goes like!! (Well ... worth a try!) [[:D]]

The big question everyones asking is ... is it worh the price. Well I got it as a birthday present but it cost around 4,000 euros for my particular model .. and that was with a discount! It's hard for me to say anything bad about it as it performs like a F***ing Ferrari, but I would say that for all you people looking at new macs, that there is not a huge speed improvement over exsisting Dual 2.7 (Nornal Dual chips that is). The main improvements really is in the bus archiecture which does communicate better with the processors, and of course it can number crunch twice as much data in one cycle.

I'd still say get it if you can, if you run logic, and your like me ... IE unimpressed with the idea of having an Intel chip in your Mac,... this is an awesome machine for that purpose. But just be warned ... it doesn't operate at 10 ghz. Sorry guys .. it's still only 2.5 ... but it does do, as I say, twice as much as the nearest competing Mac.

It's worth noting that the inside of the machine has been reworked alot since the Dual 2.7 macs. The archiecture is now all PCI express .. instead of PCI-X, so older PCI audio cards will not fit!! But Wow .. it is soooooo quiet. I thought that the 2.7 system was quiet .. this thing you can barely hear at all.

It also includes 2 ethernet ports, an extra USB 2.0 port (So theres 3 on the back, one on the front, and two up on the keyboard). As well as the usual Optical in and out which is damned useful with my DAT machine.

So, there you go.

JBOD = just a bunch of disks, regularly connected via IDE, S-ATA or FireWire/USB2 as single drives - to point out that the drives are *not* operating in a RAID configuration.

Heteroyn - if you're going for speed benchmarks, the latest Seagate drives with NCQ (all other TCQ drives almost on par) usually win all tests in the IDE/S-ATA world, even with not so much distance to the WD Raptors - well, those are the true winners of course, but the heat... the money... the heat...

Cheers,
PolarBear