Music and Audio Hardware

Making the Right Hardware Choices

For a musician just getting into adding a computer to the studio or home recording setup, there are many questions: Mac or PC? Which sound card? In this article and through various links to other resources on this site, we will attempt to answer these and other important questions. Part 2 of this feature discusses "do-it-all multimedia cards versus "pro audio" cards, external adapters and device driver issues, while part 3 looks at sound options for Macs, MIDI interface options and the pros and cons of wavetable-based sounds.

Indeed, many future possibilities depends on your choice of the hardware you base your computer music system on. Thus, our first discussion is about the computer. We've successfully used both Windows PCs and Macs, so if you have a preference for one or the other, you are not likely to be disappointed. With that said, however, there are different advantages to each platform. Here is a summary of our findings.

Computer and OS Considerations

First, let us note that platform choices are, above all else, a personal preference. We've asked people why they prefer the Mac for music and heard "...because that's what Trent Reznor uses" as the reply. Many creative people, it seems, prefer the Mac, often as a lifestyle choice more than anything else. Fortunately, there are some more substantial reasons why the Mac is a good choice for musical applications -- more on that later.

If, however, you choose to use a PC, we do not recommend Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows NT (or even Linux) for musical applications, unless the software you want to use runs best on one of these OSes (and there are a few cases where it does). In fact, choosing the software you want to run first, and then getting the computer system that runs it best is the most sensible way to proceed. Overall, Windows 98SE or Windows Me, with their widely supported and (moderately) robust multimedia architecture and broad application and hardware support, should be considered the minimum platform for Intel or compatible PCs, although you may want to consider Windows 2000 or Windows XP for even better reliability, if one of these more modern operating systems supports the hardware and software you want to run.

Older Computers

Depending on your application, an older PC may or may note be powerful enough to handle the software and hardware you'll want to use. MIDI, being a fairly old specification (first developed in 1983 and largely unchanged since then), isn't particularly demanding, but newer audio looping, signal-processing and multitrack recording packages most definitely are.Let's say, for example, that you have an old "mid-nineties" computer running a processor such as a VIA C3, AMD K5 or K6, IDT or Cyrix 686 series of Pentium compatible chips. These would not be an ideal choice for many (any?) musical applications. In fact, a Cyrix 6x86MX chip that is supposedly equivalent to a 200 MHz Pentium with MMX actually performs more like a P120 when running floating-point intensive applications such as Cubase VST or WaveLab (etc.). In short, it's just not enough. AMD K6 and K6-2 chips from roughly the same era, while better at floating point operations than those from Cyrix, also suffered from slower FPU performance than similarly clocked Intel chips.

At the very minimum, you might be able to get away with an AMD Duron, Pentium II or Intel Celeron processor. A chip with MMX enhancements (or the newer SSE extensions in the Pentium III and similar processors) provides a set of special multimedia instructions that many modern music programs (Cubase, for example) use to deliver improved performance. Indeed, some sequencers and audio applications won't even run unless the chip has these capabilities.

On the other hand, not all programs use take advantage of MMX or SSE instructions. For example, Steinberg's low-end audio-and-MIDI sequencing app, Cubasis AV, is MMX enhanced; the higher-end Cubase VST 3.5, released around the same time, was not. (Newer versions have since addressed this issue.)  A computer intended for use with MIDI applications and light-duty audio recording and/or processing tasks should have at least a Celeron, Pentium III or AMD Duron or Athlon processor clocked at 450 MHz or better, and 128MB of RAM.

For multitrack recording or real-time looping/mixing applications, a Pentium III-or-better processor, 600 MHz or faster is recommended. Getting a processor at least twice as fast as that is worthwhile, as the number of tracks and effects you can handle is directly related to the system's processing power.

What about dual CPUs?

As you may know, the most powerful Macintosh and PC systems have dual CPUs -- in other words, a system with multiple processors, each handling part of the computing shores. Unfortunately, not all applications take advantage of two (or more) CPUs, so this may or may not be worth the extra money it costs. Again, the best plan is to first determine whether the software can take advantage of the extra processor(s) and buy accordingly.

Some programs are able to make exceptionally good use of a multiprocessor system (running, of course, a multiprocessor-aware operating system such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP Professional). Steinberg's WaveLab, for example, was designed to take advantage of dual CPUs and, according to the company, processes exactly twice as fast on a dual-CPU system as it does on a single-CPU. At any rate, you should not put too much trust in "minimum requirements." An app might say it runs on a P233 with 32 MB of RAM, but it will be a lot more pleasant and reliable on a system with more horsepower.

Hard Drive(s)

For audio recording, you'll also want a large, defragmented IDE or SCSI hard disk. (Better still is a system with two SCSI hard disks, with one dedicated to your temporary audio files.) These days, however, with the price differential between IDE and SCSI disks, we'd recommend a fast 7200 RPM IDE drive, connected to an ATA66 or faster controller. Such drives are fast enough to handle several simultaneous tracks of high-quality audio. We've had good results from Maxtor DiamondMax Plus drives. Look for a drive with a 2MB or larger buffer and speedy seek times for optimal performance in musical applications.

Most experts recommend saving your audio data onto a separate drive (note: not merely a separate partition) from the one your OS is on for maximum performance. It is also prudent to "defragment" your hard drives frequently. On a Mac, this requires third-party software.

What About the Mac?

It's no coincidence that the majority of the "Studio Pro" books on the racks at music stores tend to feature Mac software and hardware solutions in their examples. It's a tribute to the affinity many professional creative people have for their Macs. You'll find Macs in many professional studio environments, where a sound card with digital I/O and a high-end Power Mac is an investment that pays off, and software tools like Steinberg's Cubase VST, Emagic's Logic Audio (now owned by Apple), Propellerhead's Reason, Ableton Live, DigiDesigns' ProTools and other great Mac-based tools have helped create some of the most famous music in the world today.

Because Macs have been popular with musicians longer than PCs have, some titles, such as Pro Tools and Logic, continue to be more highly evolved on the Mac platform. The Mac version of Logic Audio 4, for example, could handle twice as many tracks of audio data as its now-discontinued Windows sibling.

Apple has, since 2001, been transitioning to a more modern operating system its calls Mac OS X and, by the beginning of 2003, enough music and MIDI applications had been released for this operating system that, at this point, we think it should be considered the minimum baseline you should consider using if you want to make music on a Mac.

With that said, there are plenty of older MIDI and/or audio applications that don't require Mac OS X and, in fact, many older titles don't run under OS X at all. Again, you'll need to determine the requirements. We've been running OS X long enough and with enough improvement in reliability and capability that we wouldn't even think of going back to OS 9 at this point. Your results may vary.

If you do go for a Power Mac, consider the ambient noise level of the machine you choose. Some Macs, such as the now-discontinued G4 Cube or G3 iMac, are virtually silent, while others, such as the so-called "Mirrored Drive Door" Power Macs released in 2002, are notoriously noisy. Apple finally addressed this problem in 2003, with a revamped line of desktop Macs it says are "significantly quieter."

If you do choose a Mac, you'll need a Power PC-based Mac with the PCI bus architecture and a G3 or G4 processor to run Mac OS X. Avoid older PowerMacs that include "NuBus" expansion slots -- these machines cannot be used with OS X and tend to be horrifically slow.

All Macs released since 1998 provide onboard USB. Thus, a USB MIDI interface is the most practical and inexpensive way to add MIDI to Macs. USB can also be used to add audio input capabilities. There are even devices that do both, from manufacturers such as Edirol, M-Audio and others.

Note, however, that USB audio can lead to problems, too, even on a Mac. A reader report report at MacInTouch illustrates some of the many caveats. Some users find that a constant crackle can be heard when playing anything when the load on the CPU gets too great - e.g., when playing any DVD. Others report (and we can confirm) that USB audio devices and MIDI interfaces can cause various problems on some Macs.

Overall, it's reasonable to say that the Mac has fallen behind the PC in terms of the number of advanced music applications and hardware options available. However, it's also fair to characterize the Mac as somewhat better for users who "just want to get the job done" due to its greater ease of configuration and ease of use. A few years ago, we would have named its broad support support for "device profiles" courtesy of Opcode's OMS software as an advantage, however, the fact that OpCode is essentially out of business (having been bought by Gibson and the OMS products discontinued) makes this yet another liability for the pre-OS X Mac OS platform. (OS X does not need OMS -- Apple provides a built-in, vastly superior MIDI Manager.)

PCs, in general, tend to cost less (at least in upfront dollars), have a better selection of MIDI and audio-related software and can use a much larger variety of high-quality sound cards. PCs also tend to deliver more MIDI playback options from low-end sound cards. In general, we've seen better timing accuracy and fewer hardware-related problems from properly configured Macs; we're sure there are PC users who can say the exact opposite -- and Macs are less likely to need the fiddling that typically accompanies the installation and configuration of a new piece of hardware on a Windows PC. However, as mentioned earlier, we've had some difficulties on older Macs with crashes, serial communication problems and timing glitches. A newer Mac with plenty of RAM should minimize these problems.

Which Is Faster?

Today's high-end music programs demand serious processor power. While it is not possible to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the clock speeds of Macs and Windows PCs, it is safe to say that, at least at this writing, the fastest PCS are faster than the fastest Macs -- and they tend to be less expensive, in terms of upfront hardware costs. (Total cost of ownership is a different issue, which we recommend exploring if you are a long-term planner.)

Indeed, we tested the same programs -- Cubase VST and Logic Audio on machines of comparable CPU performance on minimally configured PC and Mac platforms to test the viability of "budget" configurations. On the Mac side, we tested a Power Mac 7300 with 208 MB of RAM and a 400 MHz Power PC G3 upgrade, and a G4 Cube with a 450 MHz processor and 192 MB or RAM.

On the PC side, we tested a number of machines, ranging from a 300MHz Pentium II-based Compaq to a speedy 1.53 GHz Athlon (which, astonishingly, was still hundreds of dollars less expensive than the G4 Cube!). Even the low-end PC -- today, worth only a few hundred dollars at best -- outperformed the Mac substantially. Subjectively, the application performance "felt" much better on the PC -- it was noticeably faster than either of the Mac (the G3, running Mac OS X was pathetic!) in screen redraws and general responsiveness. However, there are a number of complicating factors.

Some users find their PCs plagued by serious timing problems: erratic metronomes, crashes or other misbehaviors, which can be caused by (among other things), the PC's somewhat less sophisticated "plug and play" configuration of sound cards or other PCI-slot add-ons. Indeed, on one of our test machines,  MIDI performance was quite erratic when playing back tracks with several channels, or MIDI plus audio combinations. We traced this problem to an "IRQ sharing" issue resolved, with some effort, by swapping the offending PCI card into a different slot.

Tellingly, almost 50 percent of Cubase VST users at the Cubase for Windows Users Web Site report timing problems with their configurations -- Mac numbers are substantially lower -- although it appears Mac users of Cubase SX are an unhappy bunch, in general. Tellingly, those with fast CPUs, lots of RAM and big, fast hard disks tend to be the happiest.

Latency

A term you'll run into repeatedly if you spend much time browsing the various articles on this site is "latency." In the musical context, it means the amount of time it takes for a recorded audio input to be output through the playback function of the hardware or software used. Thus, lower latency is better. Standard Windows sound card drivers, using the so-called Windows MME (multimedia extension) driver, tend to have terrible latencies -- often as high as 750 milliseconds. That's three-quarters of a second! For comparison, a Mac running OS X, has latencies in the order of 2.9 milliseconds, for virtually instantaneous playback of the processed output of an input signal for your sound card. Imagine plugging an electric guitar into your computer's audio input and suffering a 750 ms delay before hearing its "electrified" output. Trust us -- you want low latencies.

Setting a latency value too low, however, introduces problems of its own -- typically unwanted crackling or other malfunctions. The exact value you'll be able to achieve depends on many factors. In general, anything below about 10 ms is good, and anything above 20 ms starts to become noticeable or downright annoying, depending on your ear.

A sound card with so-called "ASIO2" drivers (which each sound card manufacturer must provide) will help deliver the lowest possible latencies in programs such as Cubase. The best cards also provide a function called "direct monitoring," lacking from low-end ASIO-compatible cards such as the Creative Labs Audigy. The whole point of these drivers is to allow your music software to operate with the smallest possible delay between recording and playback.

What Sound Card?

The discerning pro or semi-pro musician will probably want to get a card with 24-bit audio sampling and 96KHz or better fidelity. Consider, however, that audio CDs are 16-bit/44.1KHz, and don't sound too shabby, and you'll see that even a "low end" card such as the $99 Creative Labs Audigy isn't bad. Then again, it really isn't all that good, either. The Audigy 2 is probably a better card to consider a baseline. It provides 24-bit/96KHz recording capabilities, ASIO2 with direct monitoring and a reasonable suite of software appropriate for casual users.

Pros will want something better. The baseline here might depends, of course, on your needs, but might be as inexpensive as the US$99 Revolution 7.1 card from M-Audio, or as elaborate as your budget can afford, running a full-blown ProTools setup or similar environment.

It's really not a good idea to struggle along with the wrong sound card. For example, the still-popular SoundBlaster Live series of cards do not include ASIO drivers (although there are unsupported hacks that allow the use of EMU's AWS sound card driver in a Sound Blaster Live to provide partial ASIO compatibility). Cubase VST 5 and the newer SX/SL releases address this problem by providing a full-duplex DirectX ASIO driver that, when used with the SB Live, reduces latency to 43 milliseconds. This is certainly better than the 750 ms you would suffer with using the standard Windows MME driver, but still well within the "noticeable/downright annoying" range noted above. Older SoundBlaster cards were even worse. The SoundBlaster AWE64, for example, has a WaveSynth driver that must be disabled to work, in a minimal fashion, with VST or Cubase Audio and it plays back only 8-bit audio while recording in 16 bits.  In short -- yecch. Don't go there.

There are many other factors to consider when choosing a sound card. Do you want  analog and/or digital I/O? How many inputs and outputs? Do you need Dolby 5.1? Or maybe even 7.1? Is 20-bit audio recording enough? (We'd argue that it is, for most users.) You'll also want to carefully compare signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios and, of course, compatibility and price. Note, also, that most pro cards do not try to replace standard Windows (or Mac, as the case may be) multimedia sound systems -- they are designed to record and playback audio only.

Is a Portable Computer a Viable Option?

Many musicians find the idea of a portable computer attractive. Indeed, a portable PC or Mac can be a real boon to the musician on the go; however, be aware that you will have to deal with more limited choices in audio interfaces, upgrade options and internal sound capabilities.

Recent models in the PowerBook series of portable Macs are a good choice for musical applications. It's easy to add additional storage to PowerBook G4 models via their built-in FireWire ports, and the processor is powerful enough to handle a reasonable amount of tracks in virtually any program you might want to run -- especially if you get one of the "Titanium" models as opposed to the newer "Aluminum" models released in 2003, which are unable to boot Mac OS 9. (We refer you back to our OS discussion above and remind you that we'd rather not rely upon Mac OS 9, anyway.)

A FireWire-capable Mac or PC is easily able to incorporate future hardware add-ons for such musician friendly operations such as Audio CD or DVD recording, digital audio mastering and MIDI+audio sequencing.

A caution, however: some older PowerBook models have acquired an unfortunate reputation for being notoriously unreliable for MIDI applications -- and indeed, for high-speed serial communications in general. We have seen numerous reports of timing problems with USB MIDI interfaces and other audio-related problems.

If, against our advice, you elect to run Mac OS 9 or an earlier release, you'll have quite a bit of setup to do to configure your Mac for MIDI operation. You'll probably need to install OMS or a similar MIDI-management system extension and, you'll probably want to manually configure your Mac apps to use any extra memory you might have available. (Windows systems do not need to manually configure memory allocations; the OS does it automatically. However, some applications, such as Steinberg's Cubase VST, may provide an option to further optimize cache settings.)

Copy Protection

On both Macs and Windows PCs, you may also encounter complexities related to an unfortunate reality of the music software business: copy-protected disks. The situation has evolved a bit over the years. Mac OS 8 and newer releases does not support the form of disk protection commonly used prior to their release. Thus, Mac users may encounter difficulties using titles such as Cubase VST 3.x and older Steinberg applications, DigiDesign SoundDesigner 2.82 or earlier, etc. See Apple's Tech Info Library article 30149 for more info on problems with Mac OS 8+ and copy-protected music applications. In a related issue, note that some music programs rely on floppy-disk-based copy protection schemes; these programs obviously present severe problems to the owner of a Mac without a floppy drive. Fortunately, these are legacy issues that aren't worth worrying about for most users running current software on current or recent hardware.

PC Sound Cards

There are essentially two categories of PC sound cards: those that support Windows Multimedia audio+MIDI, and those that are audio (or audio+digital I/O) only. In part two of this article, we'll look at both types. Read on....