Note: (my actual latest system - December 2002 - is at the bottom of this page) A SYSTEM THAT WORKS
December 2000 - Update
With the advent of the PIII and fast - 800mz and up - processors and super fast EIDE drives that make SCSI unnecessary, the PC is a very different animal than it was even a year ago and so much more is now possible. And a lot less expensive.
My system isn't even the current top-of-the-line in terms of processor speed but it still gives me everything I need for multitrack recording, editing, mixing and mastering all internally. With one exception, which I'll cover below.
My system is a PIII 866mz with 512MB RAM and two 7200 RPM ATA 100 drives totalling 115GB. I'm using Vegas Pro Audio for multitracking and mixing, Cool Edit 2000 for editing and the awesome T-Racks (plus a bunch of plug-ins) for mastering. I just added the Alesis Masterlink and I'm very happy with it. With this system, Echo Reporter (Event's test program) and Diskbench claim I can do more than 100 simultaneous tracks (after all the usual PC optimizations as outlined in the main article). I haven't tried to do 100 tracks but last night I was playing back more than 30 24-bit tracks with a whole bunch of plug-in effects - reverbs, chorus, EQs, compressors, exciters, stereo-imagers etc. and I was still only utilizing 60% of my CPU and between 5 and 15% of my hard drives so there's still plenty of overhead. And the system is rock-solid stable. I still do a lot of MIDI work and I still synchronize the MIDI from a separate PC because that is my preference and it also doesn't tax the audio PC CPU.
So what's the other exception? Reverbs. While I do use various reverb plug-ins, I still maintain that there is currently no software reverb plug-in that matches the quality of a dedicated hardware unit without consuming way too much CPU resources (at least not this week!). So I still send two of the Vegas aux buses to external Lexicons so that I can get that lush Lexicon quality without taxing my CPU. And, much as I'd like a Lexicon 224, I don't want to spend as much on a reverb as I spent on my studio so I found a really nice way to get great Lexicon quality at a very nice price.
In playing back some mixes I did in a home studio some years back using a Lexicon LXP-1 I noticed that the reverb sounded a lot better than what I was getting with the newer MPX-100 (which is very good for chorus and delay effects though) and I remembered that I had used the LXP-1 with an MRC controller and that had enabled me to get great reverb quality - much, much better than from the LXP-1 by itself and a whole league better than the MPX-100.
I found a used LXP-1/MRC combo for sale at $250 and bought it. The guy I bought it from told me of a $150 upgrade available from Audio Upgrades that "made it smoother than a PCM-70." I thought it was worth trying and boy, was it ever! The reverb quality after the upgrade is quite astounding and the whole thing cost only $400.
Since last year I have also added tube processors and external AD/DA converters to the inputs and outputs of the system and of course that has made a nice difference. I also use the wonderful LynxOne sound card as my main card and I use it in conjunction with the excellent Delta 66/Omni Studio combination from M Audio that has more than a dozen assorted ins and outs and is very flexible in its routing.
For mastering my all-out favorite tool is Ozone from Izotope. I also have Waves and T-Racks and numerous other mastering plug-ins but Ozone is by far my new tool of choice.
January 2002 - Last Update (yeah, right!)
Since last year I did a competetive upgrade to Samplitude Studio 6 (for $249) because it is so very much more powerful than Vegas and because it just sounds so damn good. There is even a free 90-day fully functional (nothing crippled) trial version at Magix. It's dangerous to download it though because if you use it for a few days you fall in love with it. I also solved the reverb problem by buying Sonic Timeworks ReverbX - the first plug-in reverb that I feel can match an outboard reverb. By using Samplitude, I no longer need the second PC for MIDI or Cool Edit for editing. This week I am also adding the Universal Audio UAD-1 plug-in card which adds Urei 1176 and Teletronix LA-2A emulations as well as Kind Of Loud's Realverb Pro (an awesome sounding reverb) and some other plugs. Apart from Ozone, I am also very happy with PSP's Vintage Warmer and the wonderful Endorphin plug-in. My most-used general use plug-ins are those from Sonic Timeworks and Ultrafunk as well as Samplitude's excellent internal effects. I'm finally really, really happy with my PC studio.
March 2002 - Last Last Update (I told you it probably wouldn't be the last!)
Well, at the last minute I changed my mind and instead installed the TC Powercore. The upgrade in sound quality is by far the biggest I've ever experienced. This $1,000 card contains the MegaVerb (from the $5,000 M5000), the Finalizer ($3,000), the chorus/delay etc. from the 1210 Spatial Expander ($1700), vintage compressors, tube-modelled EQs, a "voice strip" with EQ, compressor, de-esser, gate etc. and 2.8 ghz of onboard processing power (4 G4's) to keep the plugs from eating my CPU cycles. A bunch of additional plug-ins have also just been announced for April release.I was using the Sonic Timeworks ReverbX (my favorite software reverb plug) on a mix and I switched it out and put the MegaVerb in its place and put the Powercore's Finalizer and EQsat in the output bus (replacing the hardware Finalizer that it was previously going through), put the Voice Strip on the vocal and suddenly the mix sounded like it was coming out of a $200 per hour studio. The sound was huge and warm and with enormous depth and the vocal just hung there in its own 3-dimensional space and one nice thing was that everything was in the PC (finally!), no outboard of any kind. I also was using a lot of software DX and VST plugs and still had 50% of my CPU (a humble 866) left. Highly, highly recommended! (yes, I do like it!).
December 2002 - Last Last Last Update (at least for a while...)
Upgrade time again :)
Since I last wrote I have also added the UAD-1 for its great compressors, Pultec EQ and Nigel guitar system and have added the awesome TC Powercore ClassicVerb and 24/7 and those added a lot to my system. With the release this month of Samplitude Pro 7 and its emphasis on VSTis and auto delay-compensation for the Powercore and UAD-1, I decided to finally upgrade the whole hardware system and I'm now running an Athlon XP 2400+ on a K7S5A motherboard and I also added an 80GB Western Digital hard drive with 8 MB cache and changed the graphics card to a dual-monitor Matrox Millenium G450 and added an RME Digi Hammerfall 9636 soundcard and switched to Windows XP.You might be interested in some stats regarding this system as I just finished a quick test to compare it to what I had before (the PIII/866). I just ran 106 24-bit simultaneous tracks and it used 18% CPU and 30% disk in Samplitude 7. Of course that was just tracks with no effects. But a song that had a lot of tracks and a *lot* of effects that used 75-80% of the CPU and a similarly high number for the disk (I forget exactly what it was) on the PIII only uses 20-25% CPU and about 20% disk on this one. It's really nice to have all this extra headroom. And very stable indeed.
Maybe I'll be able to resist upgrading again for a while...:)
Tony Rockliff
