Majoria

I upgraded in the spring to A7's after comparing to some Focal's and love the improvement. Still need to have good treatment in order to hear all the improvements. I've made several panels from OC 703 and none are permanently mounted, thus I can move them as necessary for tracking and for mixing.

My brother-in-law just showed me his Mac, a dual quad core (8 cores theoretically) 3.2GHz with way too much RAM for a normal person. For his works (digital photo editing, some video editing) it's justifiable, has both OS 10.5 and XP on it. Not that I'm going to get that carried away, but would all of that really be able to be used by Pro Tools 7.3 LE or 8?

I like the desktop concept with the more power but the Macbook Pro may be the most efficient.

I posted this in the recording forum but received no responses, so I'm trying here.

I've been contemplating updating my computer for my Pro Tools LE 7.3 rig, currently I use a Dell Dimension that I bought new 3 years ago, single 2.53 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM, XP home. My use is just as a hobbyist, I use my rig for recording my own projects, my two bands, and also for song writing.

I use a lot of plugins, some of which are very tasking on the system.

I was looking at the various new PC options but came across some comments about Macs that peaked my curiosity. Can someone clarity if a PC and a Mac each have 8 GB of RAM, does each have the ability to allocate all available and not needed RAM by the OS to use for Pro Tools or are do they cap Pro Tools at a fixed amount, like 2GB or something regardless of the amount of RAM? My DAW doesn't see the internet. What other advantages/disadvantages are there to consider for Macs? I know about the stability issues of Macs and that PC's only come with Vista now (which I'm not really interested in), what other factors are there? I'm curious if I really can justify the price of a Mac as they appear to be much higher than a PC. I'm really just looking at desktop computers, not laptops.

I'm not planning on making a purchase in 2008, not really sure when, just looking at options at this point. My brother-in-law is very familiar with Macs but not from the DAW perspective.

44.1 kHz and 24 bit.

The bits make a bigger difference than the frequency so I keep the frequency down and save file size so I can have more plugins. Besides, CD's are at 44.1 and so it will end up there anyway.

The problem may be the fact that you're not using MP3's. My iPod will play my studio recorded MP3's that are encoded at 44.1/24 with no trouble but it won't play any WAV, AIFF, WMA, etc file so I have to go to high end MP3's for it.

Most of my studio material on my iPod is 24 bit and plays just fine.

I've made a variety of panels including a vocal booth out of Owens Corning 703 rigid fiberglass, last purchase was $53 for 6 sheets of 2'x4'x2". Home improvement stores don't carry it, you have to go to a vendor which you can find here.

The vocal booth made a HUGE improvement to vocal tracks just in my home hobby studio, think of what a room treated by a pro can sound like.

The singer in my band has perfect pitch and he learned it by just spending hours with a perfectly tuned piano, memorizing the exact proper note and then anything else wasn't right. Kind of like how counterfitters are trained, they don't study counterfeit money, they just hyperanalyze the real money so any deviation from it means it's a counterfeit.

So far no luck with me that way but it's a possibility for someone who's not as tone deaf as I am.

I also would love to train my ears to identify frequencies. Right now, I'd love to have a spectrum analyzer since I know at times there are frequency issues in my mixes but trial and error doesn't seem to be helping much. Timing and rhythm are easier for me as I've been a drummer for about 15 years. For pitch itself I just get my band's singer to take a listen as he can detect the slightest off key notes. When our band does recordings I have him present during tracking so that we don't have another session of getting what I thought was a great take only to find out it's a little out of tune.

My biggest area to improve would be anything that involves using my ears. I'm not an audio engineer by career, just by hobby. Also, I'm complete tone deaf. Luckily, the singer in my band has perfect pitch so he helps out there. What I really need are more devices that visually display audio, such as a spectrum analyzer, so that I can correlate what I'm hearing to something to which I can relate. This hopefully will assist in training my ears. Many times trial and error only result in errors and no fix for a certain issue.

And more money for better equipment wouldn't hurt.