I've been left a bit high and dry by Native instruments:With compensation from a car crash in the 90s, I bought a Protools Mixplus, then upgraded to an HD2 system, under windows NT
At the time it was the only kit to really offer a full low latency DAW, and over the years I've bought a lot of TDM and RTAS plugins
At present I run it on a Dell server, with 2 x 4 core Xeon 3.2Ghz, with 16Gb RAM, and win 7
trouble is, I use the NI Komplete package, and they have discontinued RTAS support. That would be tolerable, but updates to libraries are starting to prevent me using the Kontakt version from last year that was the last RTAS version
Sooner or later, I need to migrate
the HDX and Native Protools systems are £4.5k+ as an upgrade from my kit
I doubt I need one really
I bought a Macbook 12 to play with Logic in a fanless laptop
It's nice
I was thinking of getting a Macbook Pro to run Logic and Protools 10 via ASIO (I heard that Macbooks are quiet) - then at least I could use some of my old RTAS plugins as well as AAX, but when I looked, the latest fastest one scores only 8.8 - slightly higher than the 8.4 score of my 3 year old windows laptop
benchmarks:
mac: 4980hq = 10107
old Dell laptop 3840QM = 8907
to be honest, £2.5k for that sounds a lot for performance from 3 years ago
I'm now wondering about instead getting a custom PC from QuietPC, with one of these fitted:
Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 @ 2.30GHz
is that overkill? It's got 14 cores
I assumed that would be a good long term DAW platform
Comments
I strongly suggest a (temporary!) flit over to www.soundonsound.com where there are many top recording guys with powerful but quiet rigs.
Also "Mr Scan" Pete will give you excellent non-partisan advice.
You have the complication of W10 looming but at least it seems excellent for music despite its nosiness!
Dave.
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