Setup question for Marty

[Nicholas Cardinal]

Hi Marty,

Could you please give us specifics on David's PC setup. Are you using slave PC's? I also heard you guys are using solid state drives. How is that working out? Thanks in advance.

Best,
Nick C.

[Marty Frasu]

You caught us during a transitional period.
I'll describe David's current setup and I will tell you about the equipment we have ordered Today!
The virtual orchestra consists of 6 PCs we got from Vision DAW. I can not say enough good things about Vision DAW.
I know you can build your own PC from parts for cheaper. Are all the parts compatible? Have they been tested for the intended purpose?
By getting a PC from Vision, you can guarantee that they have tested all the components and they are the best on the market.
They stand behind their product, should something go wrong, you can call them, get a real live person on the phone and they will take care of you. I don't know about you, but that is worth a lot to me. We do endorse their product. David paid for them. There is no freebies or nonsense going on with our endorsement of their products. I put this up here because of the great relationship we have had with the company.
Just to be clear.

Back to the gear:
The 6 PCs are running windows XP 32 bit. They are all equipped with Hammerfall 9632 PCI cards. They all run Kontakt except for one that runs Gigastudio. I can't wait to get rid of that one. It works OK, I'm just more comfortable with Kontakt than I am with Gigastudio.
For sounds it is the EWQLSO Platinum with a few sounds left over from ancient Roland, EMU and Akai samplers from the 90's.

For midi, David has 4 Unitor 8 midi interfaces and they go midi in to the Hammerfall midi in.
We had the interfaces left over from all the hardware synths and samplers Dave used to own.

They lightpipe back into his Logic system that has 4 MOTU 2408 MK3 Audio interfaces.
The MOTUs give us 96 channels of audio I/O.
Everything receives wordclock via a Rosendahl wordclock generator.
We had been running it at 44.1, but in the next system revision, we are going to run at 48K.

The only hardware we have besides that is 2 Groove Tubes Vipre mic preamps that we use to track guitars, percussion, it also has in instrument in that we use as a direct box for bass and guitar. If we use it for guitar, it's in conjunction with some type of amp model , like Guitar Rig, The Logic amp model or Nomad Factory.
For video we use a Canopus firewire box that puts digital video up on some flat screen TVs.
The computer is an 8 core mac pro with 3 additional terabyte drives and some firewire drives for backup.
The rest of the system is all software.
David has a lot of plug in synths and FX and sound libraries.

The New.
We just placed an order with Vision DAW today for an 8 core nahalem machine with a lot of ram.
I wanted solid state drives and may get them in the future, a 256GB SSD won't fit the amount of sounds we want to put on it.
The price will come down on them and the drive capacities will increase, but when I did the math, it's not going to work. Today.

We are going to see just how many sounds we can load, how much polyphony we can get, it's on a 64 bit OS and it's going to be Kontakt 3.5
So stay tuned for the test results.

We also plan on buying another Mac Pro, just to load even more sounds. With Snow Leopard just around the corner, it's the same deal.
We are going to see how much it can take. We plan on loading a lot of PLAY libraries on that.

The other change is Midi over Lan (MOL) instead of all those Unitors, we are going to go with MOL.
The idea is less more powerful hardware.

The reason for going to 48K for the sampling rate is all of film and television post production runs at 48K.
We have recorded live orchestra at 96K, only to have it downsampled to 48K because no dubbing stage works at a higher sampling rate than 48K.
I'm going to test to see what sounds better, to go native at 48K or go higher and downsample.
So stay tuned and I will tell you just how much we tortured our new computer.

[LEX]

Marty,

Good choice going with MOL. You'll find that it is alot "tighter" than the old hardware boxes.

LEX

[AlCapps]

Thanks alot Marty, this was very informative!. I've found in the last 6 months, everyone asks for 48K, 24bit. It's so much fun to upgrade your system.

Al Capps

[emeinrath]

Hello Marty,

I did the test at the Galaxy Studio in Belgium.

We've recorded at 192K 96K and 48K a string orchestra (20 pieces 6-5-4-3-2).
ProTools.

Then we've downsampled to 48K and the result is impressively better at 96K. Difference between 192K and 96K isn't that big. But 92K downsampled sounds far better than 48K specially (of course) in the hi end frequencies. Sound is much clearer and less agressive.


++
Ernst

[Marty Frasu]

The sample rate conversion was done in Pro Tools? The Tweakhead setting I presume?

[emeinrath]

Yes. Tweakhead of course. What shouldn't be done (but I know you know ;-) is going from 96K to 44.1K...

Best,

Ernst

[Marty Frasu]

Received Dave's New Vision DAW yesterday. What a Rocket. Windows has better cpu optimization than Leopard currently, any plug in is distributed across all cores evenly. Today I will have number for voices. We are upgrading our MOTU audio system with an Apogee Symphony System. V-Bus and S-Bus. good tech.