To iMac or not to iMac?

[beyond dead]

Nothing wrong with 1 port. Firewire is built to be chained.

very very very slowly

if you think about it, the external drive goes from sata, to fw, to sata


BOTTLENECK

im tempted to go with a used power mac g5 over a new imac and switching to mpowered instead of logic.

or switch to p.c (I never thought i would say this)

 

[::XeS::]

Yeah....eSata should be a standard these days and the problem with iMacs is that they don't have neither eSata ports nor express card ports

 

[beyond dead]

im almost positive that apple will have to include esata, and at least i5 processors on the base model imac in the next few months if they expect to keep their power user customers. paying over a grand for a comp with core 2 duo and no esata is wrong if you ask me. I guess the display is nice for people who will watch movies or play games, but its just a nice little bonus for me.

 

[dani]

heh, have you used a firewire drive? they are very not slow.

in terms of external connections for drives, it's only beaten by esata, marginally.

in any case, USB drives are in fact fast enough. the last band recording i done, i used an external 2.5" laptop hard drive, over USB, and it was fine with over 32 channels of 44.1/24 audio..

thanks,

 

[beyond dead]

yeah, of course I have used a firewire drive bro.

ever tried to launch a session with 300+ takes on an external drive daisy chained with an interface? it takes awhile. If time is important to you, like it is to me, than you would get very frustrated!

 

[006]

The whole "bottleneck" deal... those of you pointing out this "disadvantage" are really exaggerating things... I have used my Glyph external FW drive for years AFTER every interface I've owned since I bought it and NEVER ONCE had a single issue. I plan on getting one of the new 27" iMacs in the near future and I have zero worries about having to use a single FW port... I've already been doing that on my G5 for years anyway.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

yeah, of course I have used a firewire drive bro.

ever tried to launch a session with 300+ takes on an external drive daisy chained with an interface? it takes awhile. If time is important to you, like it is to me, than you would get very frustrated!

300+ takes? Not Firewire's fault you can't manage your audio. Internal drive wouldn't be much better either.

 

[jipchen]

just daisy chain em.
theyd be using a shared bus even if it had 2 ports.

Nothing wrong with 1 port. Firewire is built to be chained.

Well... thank you. Now i'm GASing even harder
DO WANT THE 27" IMAC /w QUADCORE!

(I hate that you can't put PCI(e) Cards in it, for protools/UAD/other stuff..)
And 1 Firewire port sucks nevertheless, also if it's as fast as two. It's just more comfortable.

 

[Let it burn...]

iMacs are awesome and really fast to work on. The major let-down for me is the lack of a PCI slot for UAD cards.

 

[TheDriller]

Aren't the iMacs due for a revision some time in the Summer?

and the Mac Pros are due for a revision in the next month or so if i'm not mistaken.
unless the OP is in a major hurry it may be worth waiting a while.
it'll be interesting to see if Apple listen to their pro users and have expansion slots / eSata for the new iMacs, or they just continue to slide into shitty consumer gadget territory.

actually, now that someone has brought it up, has anyone here ever bought a used Mac? any troubles?

I'd imagine it'd be fine as long as you can get Applecare on it and have a decent length of warrenty.

 

[006]

Aren't the iMacs due for a revision some time in the Summer?

and the Mac Pros are due for a revision in the next month or so if i'm not mistaken.
unless the OP is in a major hurry it may be worth waiting a while.
it'll be interesting to see if Apple listen to their pro users and have expansion slots / eSata for the new iMacs, or they just continue to slide into shitty consumer gadget territory.

actually, now that someone has brought it up, has anyone here ever bought a used Mac? any troubles?

I'd imagine it'd be fine as long as you can get Applecare on it and have a decent length of warrenty.

My PowerMac G5 dual2.0 was already a few years old when I bought it as refurb from an authorized refurb dealer on eBay like 3 years ago. It came with a 1 year warranty from them. I've only had a problem with the hard drive but it was old as fuck anyway, I thought my G5 was a goner a couple of times but replacing the main drive has seen 0 issues since. Other than that nothing.

 

[arv_foh]

I have a refurb Macbook Pro, no problems and I saved $700

 

[Lustrum]

Aren't the iMacs due for a revision some time in the Summer?

and the Mac Pros are due for a revision in the next month or so if i'm not mistaken.
unless the OP is in a major hurry it may be worth waiting a while.
it'll be interesting to see if Apple listen to their pro users and have expansion slots / eSata for the new iMacs, or they just continue to slide into shitty consumer gadget territory.

actually, now that someone has brought it up, has anyone here ever bought a used Mac? any troubles?

I'd imagine it'd be fine as long as you can get Applecare on it and have a decent length of warrenty.

October at the earliest, but definitely before christmas this year!

So i'lll wait and see what apple brings to the table, hopefully the price of the equivelant of what exists (800 quid cheapest online) wont change, cos of the other gear!

 

[beyond dead]

the whole point of using fw is because its faster than usb. so why would you want to use fw if there are 2 devices daisy chained from one fw port?

sure, sessions may load just as fast as on an old g5, but we are running dual and quad core intel processors, we should be moving faster now. firewire is old technology. I am being a bit of a picky cunt when I say that sessions load slow, but if im paying over a grand for a computer I should be allowed to be a picky cunt about speed. lol

and I do manage my audio, but I gotta open the reopen the sessions sometimes, and I dont want to have to always go through the hassle of deleting tracks, merging takes all that stuff while tracking. Im in a creative mindset.

these things are not too big of a deal, but I think that If im going to buy a new computer it should run faster than my old Imac. I could load big sessions faster with my imac with 2 fw 400s than I can with a fw 800 with 2 devices daisy chained.

just my 2 cents like I said Im a picky bitchy cunt about this stuff lol

 

[AudioGeekZine]

I haven't seen any lag when daisy chaining devices.

I wish some companies would just start making FW 800 audio interfaces. There is no reason not to.

 

[beyond dead]

its silly really. I guess I should quit complaining and accept that this is the way it is in the technology business world. they like to make as much as they can off old technology before introducing the new stuff.

as for the original topic, Im very sure that apple s new releases will be worth waiting for! But if they add the extras we are dying for to the imac line, they might jeopardize the relevance of their mac pro line :/

 

[beyond dead]

I haven't seen any lag when daisy chaining devices.

I wish some companies would just start making FW 800 audio interfaces. There is no reason not to.

that would be another great solution.... and I totally agree

 

[jipchen]

I haven't seen any lag when daisy chaining devices.

I wish some companies would just start making FW 800 audio interfaces. There is no reason not to.

RME Fireface 800?

 

[jnaz1]

I'm going to say one thing and preface it with the statement that I have not read this entire thread so I may be repeating. That being said, I used a Mac Pro running Cubase in my studio exclusively for 4 years (first version 4 then 5). In the middle of '09 I started realizing the plethora of free plugins that exist for the pc and noticed in the Cubase.net forums that we mac users were having a number of problems that PC users were not. In December I built a bad ass i7 3.2GHz oct core machine with 6gb of ram and an extremely tweakable, overclockable motherboard (Asus P6X58D) for $1200. Plugins beware! This machine eats them for a snack. All my Cubase problems are solved and Windows7 is ROCK SOLID. I've had no issues running 8 hour sessions. I still use my mac pro for tracking vocals (it's much quieter than my PC behemoth) but that's it. Haven't looked back.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

RME Fireface 800?

runs at the same spec with either FW400 or 800 connection. That design is also 6(?) years old, and still WAY overpriced for its feature set.