My new Soundchaser DAW

[donnie]

I just wanted to let everyone know that I just got a DAW from Soundchaser specifically for giga and sample recording. I would definately suggest that if you are in the market for a dedicated PC that you give these guys a call. They did a great job and everything works like a champ! The rack enclosure is very sturdy and houses everything very nicely.

Here are the specs:

Athlon 1.2 ghz
768 ram
15 gig IDE boot
18 gig SCSI 160 recording drive
60 gig removable IDE backup/gig drive

This thing rocks!

Donnie

PS. And yes I paid full pop for this from them and it\'s worth every penny. I just wanted to post something positive since there hasn\'t been much lately http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif

[SteveHanlon]

Hey Donnie,

What kind of IDE drives did you get? Are they Ultra ATA-66 or 100?
What are the specs on them and what brand?

Thanks for the info.

What did you pay (just curious for my own investment)?

[donnie]

Marty,

They are IBM ATA100\'s. The 60gig is removable also.

For the sound cards I got a Hammerfall 9652 hooked via lightpipe to a ADI8-DS for the AD conversion. It sounds awesome! It makes my Gina card on my other system sound awful.

Donnie

[Kenn159]

Hi Donnie
But here is the determining factur of wether or not you have a way cool machine.
Do you get any pops and clicks ?
A simple test for this is load a large piano like giga piano ,hold down the sustain pedal and play like a mad man for 5 minutes
or so .
If you dont hear any pops and clicks youve achieved something that Ive haven\'t been able to fix on my Pentium 3 450.
Ill probably need to upgrade soon myself ,If this works for you maybe I will consider a athlon 1.2

[NAZARU]

Donnie,
What type of motherboard and Ram are you using?

[donnie]

Hey guys it is a AMD Athlon Thunderbird 266/1.2, ASUS A7V133 Motherboard, 768 megs of PC133 RAM

No pops or clicks at all and getting the full 160 without even breaking a sweat!

The cool thing about having someone like Soundchaser do this is that everything works flawlessly about of the box. Everything is configured to it\'s max. I think my boot drive is only about 700 megs full right now!


Donnie

[Kenn159]

Hi Donnie
Did soundchaser recommend the Tbird Athlon over a Pentium 3 or 4 for Giga studio.
Or was it your choice to go with the Athlon?
Thanks , Ken

[donnie]

Kenn,

Actually I went on Paul\'s recomendation at Soundchaser. I originally was going to get a P4 but he talked me out of it. To be honest I can\'t remember what the reason was but I can find out or you can call them.

Donnie

[NAZARU]

Donnie,
Have you had an opportunity to see how many real time plugins you can run? Peace.

[donnie]

Here\'s what I do. I have two PC\'s now both running GS controlled from my Mac G4. On one PC (the PIII 550) I mostly have the winds and strings and run two reverbs and one EQ. On the second PC (the new Athlon) I have three reverbs and two EQ\'s going with over a gig of sounds loaded. The performance meter is at about 6% when at rest and 10-12% when playback is occuring. It\'s pretty sweet!! Both machines get the full 160 notes of polyphony with no problem so having 320 notes availible is REALLY nice.

A good tip that I\'ve figured out from this is to set the voice stealing to about 20 if you know that you are constantly maxing out your polyphony. I seem to get less glitches this way.

Donnie

[This message has been edited by donnie (edited 05-19-2001).]

[NAZARU]

Sounds like heaven Donnie.
I was torn between deciding on the A7M DDR
266 which was hell to find or the A7V 133 SDRAM. There doesn\'t seem to be much difference in speed between the DDR platform and the SDRAM platform for these particular boards with all things being equal and I think that I\'ll go with the A7V because it is cheaper, holds twice as much ram, has no stability issues, and is supposed to be very friendly for overclocking. Peace.

[Simon Ravn]

Sounds cool Donnie. What EQ\'s are you talking about? The NFX one? And verb too? hmm.. I plan to buy a Digi9652 to replace my Gina in the Gigastudio machine and then send its ADAT output to my Pulsar machine. However it would be cool to be able to add some close-to-realtime EQ and EFX through Cubase or another program on the Gigastudio machine. Have you tried that? The Digi9652 has very low latency so it should be possible to add realtime VST or DX reverb. I just don\'t know if Gigastudios output can be sent to Cubase somehow?

[ednammour]

I too just bought a PC-DAW from SoundChaser. Amazing customer service over there. The machine works flawlessly. But here\'s the rub: it is also very loud -- one of the noisiest PC\'s I\'ve ever encountered. The T-Bird processor runs very hot, needs heavy cooling (I\'ve read since). Can\'t relegate the unit to another room (don\'t have one), don\'t want to spend a $1300 on a isolation rack from Mid-Atlantic Products, am nervous about installing power supplies, PC fans, etc. from QUIET PC.

Soundchaser is getting back to me on this --
I very definitely trust they\'ll find a solution (they seem to be a very, very good company)

Just thought you should know,
Ed

[dnortana]

Ed,
I too have a noisy PC - built my own, seems virtually identical to Donnie\'s, got the specs from the rme-audio.com site.
The computer is in a rackmount I bought from rackmountpro, which has, in addition to the power supply cooling fan in the rear, two small cooling fans on the motherboard, and a big fan in the front grille.
It was noisy, real noisy. So, I got a utility for monitoring the cpu temperature, read its temperature with the front mounted fan operating. Then I disconnected the front mounting fan entirely, fired up the PC , and checked the cpu temperature again. Virtually no change, maybe a degree or two.
Conclusion? A much quieter PC, now, but still with adequate cooling for the cpu.
By using a temperature monitor, you ensure that you won\'t be harming anything.
Good luck.
Trond.

[Haydn]

Many tests performed by Intel regarding processor cooling has shown that many times extra fans are not necessary and many times cause the processor run hotter! Most fan/heat sink combos especially the boxed versions by Intel and AMD do not need extra cooling. The most important fan is in the power supply pulling the warm air out of the case.

I updated my power supply with one of the variable speed fans that changes speed depending on how hot the system runs. It is quite quiet especially with the newer hard drives that you can barely hear.

[ednammour]

SoundChaser\'s solution:

Called them, told them about the noise problem. They did additional tweaking on the power supply fan, and now the thing is WHISPER QUIET!

Thanks for the great posts regarding noise solutions.

Ed

[studioJ]

Donnie,

how is the latency on your soundchaser system? That\'s the only thing buggin me about my homegrown system--around 15 ms on average. Whereas my other synths are around 3-6 ms. Not a good thing for drums or bass.

You can test latency by recording a perfectly quantized impulse sound from Gigastudio (like a hihat or snare) into your Audio sequencer computer and comparing the attacks of the recorded signal to the MIDI note using a real time ruler (min.sec.ms).
BPM=120 seems to make things line up nicely.

thanks

[pantonality]

For those interested in a quiet power supply the Silencer from PCPowercooling.com is great. I have two systems in my studio running with these guys and together they are still much quieter than your typical PC. My hard drives are fairly quiet, but they\'re still louder than the fan noise of two PCs.

Steve www.mp3.com/stevechandler (\"http://www.mp3.com/stevechandler\") www.mp3.com/ettienne (\"http://www.mp3.com/ettienne\")

[vudoo]

hey Donnie,

Can you tell me how your drives are set up ??? since the a7v133 has 2 normal IDE bus ( primary/secondary ) and 2 ATA100 IDE bus. Also what CDrom are you using and where is it installed ( what ide bus is it on ?? ).
hope you can help out since i have a very similar rig to yours...everything seems to work fine except for when i want to import a multi Giga disk ( like my Bosendorfer )..it takes a looooong time ( definitely not normal )...Thanks.
My rig is :
-A7V133
-athlon 1.4
-768 Mg ram
-40 gb IBM on regular primary IDE bus ( as master)
-Sony CDrom on secondary regular IDE bus ( as master )
-60 Gb IBM on Primary ATA100 IDE bus ( as master )
System is tweaked as recommanded by Tascam/Nemesys, my sound card is Delta100 with a PC flyer midi interface.

[donnie]

Hello!

Our systems are VERY similar except I have a 36 gig scsi drive for audio and the cd rom drive is scsi also.

Donnie