apinkel2

I'm curious how vista was slow for you... are you saying your ibook could handle as high a track count as your vista machine?

See, I have a hang up that since i have a 64 bit processor, I need a 64 bit OS. Help me stop!! Look at it this way... your machine is ready for the future. When 64 bit OS's, drivers and applications catch up to your hardware you will be ready for them. Both apple and MS are in the same boat here... neither one has a viable 64Bit OS yet. But they both will within the next year or so. And the previously mentioned point about XP (or Vista) not recognizing more than 3GB of RAM is correct. But again, once 64 bit OS's catch up you'll be ready.

I should have stated this earlier... don't even try the 64 bit version of XP Pro. It is not an option. Software and driver support isn't there and never will be. On Vista performance. If the applications and drivers are written for Vista there are some audio benchmarks for Vista that show that performance improved... of course the benchmarks I've seen weren't exactly impartial. With Vista they did re-architect the system to give higher priority to audio and video systems to insure glitch free processing... in theory Vista should be better for audio work but it still remains to be seen how good a job MS did. Some things, (games in particular) perform worse on Vista, and you will see a lot of comments on poor performance on Vista by the vocal gaming crowd. And rightly so.

What bdegrande said. Also, XP Pro 32 bit and Vista 32 bit both support the same amount of RAM (roughly 3GB) and both support the latest processors. Xp Pro 64 bit and Vista 64 bit both support much larger amounts of RAM. The downside is that drivers for XP Pro 64 bit are virtually non-existent. Drivers for Vista (32 or 64 bit) are starting to show up but it will still probably be about 6 months before there is a wide selection of interfaces with Vista drivers. A number of older interfaces will never have Vista drivers. While I prefer Vista and all the little tweaks that MS put into it you really have to do a lot of homework ahead of time to go with Vista for audio right now. Cakewalk has a good reference on the current state of Vista from an audio standpoint. I'd check out that page to get a feel for what interfaces are vista ready.

There was a british distributor of Oktava mics who claimed they had exclusive use of the name oktava. The actual Russian Oktava mic mfr stopped supplying mics to the distributor so the distributor found some chinese mics and slapped the oktava name on them. You can head to the rec.audio.pro newsgroup and search for "oktava information" if you want all the gory details. I've got one of the russian 012's... the only thing I have to compare it against is an SM57 and a Blue Snowball USB mic. It's much more accurate than either of these two mics and so far has really worked well for drum overheads. I was looking at the studio projects C4's and the Rode NT5 but went with the oktavas as they seem to be really highly rated for drum overheads and acoustic gtr... the two apps I wanted them for.