MacBook Pro or PC?

N

NYCmusakman

New member
I am thinking of purchasing a MacBook Pro to start my new recording studio but love the flexibility of a PC. I want to get a laptop either way so i can remain portable and not be tied down to one location in my apartment. I'd like to take my DAW in the living room, bedroom or wherever.

The new MacBook Pro has USB 2.0 ports and Thunderbolt but no longer FireWire. I am curious if this should sway me towards PC to not only save some money but can also get USB 3.0 and FireWire. Not too many affordable audio controllers out there for Thunderbolt if @ all.

Any suggestions?
 
Go with a PC. Mac's are 80% marketing hype. A PC can do all of the same things cheaper and allow you more money to spend on other gear.
 
Thanks. Any suggestions on a kick a$$ laptop for recording? Once i get the PC / MaC figured out i gotta get started on Audio interface / controller research. : )
 
First, you're wrong. All currently shipping MacBook Pro models have FireWire. Only the non-Pro MacBook and the MacBook Air don't.

Second, even if it didn't have FireWire, in five years all the high-end audio will probably be Thunderbolt (formerly Light Peak) anyway. I'm told that it is far, far superior to either USB or FireWire for audio and video purposes.

Third, I'd expect that within at most a year or two, we'll see boxes that can bridge Thunderbolt to additional FireWire ports (or USB ports, or ExpressCard slots, or eSATA, or fibre channel, or ...). Thunderbolt provides two channels, each of which can carry the full traffic of a PCIe x4 slot or four PCIe x1 slots. (Granted, you lose 8 Gbps of one channel in one direction for DisplayPort data if you're using an external display on the port, but that still leaves one full 10Gbps full duplex channel and part of the second.) And Thunderbolt was specifically designed as a means of tunneling PCI Express traffic, which means that it's absolutely trivial to build boxes that provide FireWire ports (or anything else you can put in a PCIe slot) using Thunderbolt.
 
All that shit is dandy and all....but being that he is looking for a laptop I think it's safe to assume he's not building to anything more than a home recording/project studio which just made all that stuff overkill.
 
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Right now, all the Thunderbolt A/V gear is at the high end because hardware engineers just got their hands on the bus a few months ago. It will bubble its way down to semipro stuff in a couple of years. In five years, it will likely have replaced USB as the most common connector for external hard drives. It's that much better. And it has the backing of Intel....

So sure, it might be overkill. It's also the direction things are headed, so going with hardware that doesn't have TB could limit your ability to add stuff you might want in three or four years. I guess it really comes down to a question of how long you plan to keep using the laptop.

Don't think of USB 3.0 as being the way lots of stuff is going to be done in the future. Think of it as a technological dead end that Intel has decided to replace with something better. That should put TB in the correct perspective. :)
 
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone. Against some recommendations i just purchased the MacBook Pro. I'm just digging the OS and looking forward to using Logic Pro 9. Now i have to consider an udio interface. i don't want to spend a ton of cash since i am thinking Thunderbolt products will come out eventually. I'm thinking of perhaps the Alesis Master Controller. it's not that cheap but should be good until the thunderbolt technology catches up., Any feedback or suggestions on the Alesis Master Controller with Logic Pro 9 and Macbook Pro? Thanks in advance! I can't wait to start recording again. : )
 
dgatwood said:
First, you're wrong. All currently shipping MacBook Pro models have FireWire. Only the non-Pro MacBook and the MacBook Air don't.

Second, even if it didn't have FireWire, in five years all the high-end audio will probably be Thunderbolt (formerly Light Peak) anyway. I'm told that it is far, far superior to either USB or FireWire for audio and video purposes.

Third, I'd expect that within at most a year or two, we'll see boxes that can bridge Thunderbolt to additional FireWire ports (or USB ports, or ExpressCard slots, or eSATA, or fibre channel, or ...). Thunderbolt provides two channels, each of which can carry the full traffic of a PCIe x4 slot or four PCIe x1 slots. (Granted, you lose 8 Gbps of one channel in one direction for DisplayPort data if you're using an external display on the port, but that still leaves one full 10Gbps full duplex channel and part of the second.) And Thunderbolt was specifically designed as a means of tunneling PCI Express traffic, which means that it's absolutely trivial to build boxes that provide FireWire ports (or anything else you can put in a PCIe slot) using Thunderbolt.
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Wow wow wow, easy!!

You clarified the firewire/usb point ok, but this guy wanted some viewpoints about using mac or pc, you didn't help at all, really!!. I wouldn't use a whole paragraph to say someone is so wrong!! (At least not without aporting something to the real topic "pc or mac")

As for myself, i'd go to PC since it's more versatile with other stuff too.
 
I didn't use a whole paragraph to say that the original poster was wrong. That was just the first sentence. :)

The rest of it was intended to point out two things:

1. That FireWire isn't what you should be asking about long-term, i.e. that the better hardware will likely shift away from FireWire towards Thunderbolt soon.

2. That in a couple of years, MacBook Pro machines probably won't have FireWire, but it won't matter because you'll be able to pick up a $20 adapter that plugs into your Thunderbolt port. :)

And then there's the third point, which was just implied: that if you're going to buy a PC, you should wait for Ivy Bridge, when Intel integrates Thunderbolt hardware.
 
And what is your guarantee that thunderbolt is going to be such a huge success? I remember years ago getting tons of advice praising firewire because in the future everything will be firewire. One thing you can be certain of right now and in the distant future is that USB has been and will most likely be here for a very long time and a USB interface is a sure thing. Being an early adopter is just a bad gamble.
 
Murdersgalore said:
And what is your guarantee that thunderbolt is going to be such a huge success? I remember years ago getting tons of advice praising firewire because in the future everything will be firewire. One thing you can be certain of right now and in the distant future is that USB has been and will most likely be here for a very long time and a USB interface is a sure thing. Being an early adopter is just a bad gamble.
Click to expand...

There's no guarantee, but it is rather significant that Intel is behind it. One of the biggest reasons FireWire never took off is that (to my knowledge) Intel never integrated FireWire hardware into any of their chipsets. That means that every manufacturer had to either add an outboard FireWire chip from someone (TI, NEC, Lucent, or Ricoh... *shudder*) or they didn't get FireWire. With Thunderbolt, Intel has committed to actually making it part of the motherboard chipset (in Ivy Bridge). That's a night-and-day difference right there, as it means that every manufacturer of Intel-based computers will get the functionality for free. In other words, you can safely expect pretty much 100% of Intel-based computers to have a TB port going forward.

Besides, I'm not suggesting that everyone go out and buy a whole bunch of Thunderbolt hardware. The safe bet is to buy computers with a TB port, then sit back and wait to see what happens. Let the early adopters work out the bugs and overpay for the first couple of generations of TB hard drives and audio interfaces, then start paying attention if and when it becomes significant.

Either way, the important thing to understand is that Thunderbolt is not something that can realistically be added to a machine after the fact. It's a lot faster than ExpressCard, and would require at least an x16 PCIe 1.0 slot, an x8 PCIe 2.0 slot, or an x4 PCIe 3.0 slot on a desktop. Thus, odds are good that you either get a motherboard with TB or you don't. And that was the point I was trying to convey. Choosing a computer with Thunderbolt is basically a way of future-proofing your investment.
 
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moresound said:
Neither PC or Mac ... get a stand alone recorder like the zoom R16.
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I don't think I'd go that route. I love my H4n and all, but... well, how about pros and cons.

Pros:

  • Makes it easy to just hit a couple of buttons and start recording. I keep one on my piano for scratch recordings for this reason.
  • Very portable for the rare occasion when you need to do recording outside the studio.

Cons:

  • I have to leave it turned on because it actually takes longer to boot than my Mac!
  • It offers basically no editing capabilities except for punch in/out.
  • AFAIK, the punch in/out edits are destructive, making it difficult to get clean edits without a pop. (I've never tried it, mind you, but the problem is inherent to the concept of punch in/out unless you can slip and slide the new region slightly to minimize the waveform disruption and add a quick crossfade at both edit points.)
  • The pres are noticeably noisier than the pres in my MOTU audio interfaces (which, in turn, aren't my cleanest pres).

I'd personally find it way too limiting. YMMV.
 
dgatwood said:
Right now, all the Thunderbolt A/V gear is at the high end because hardware engineers just got their hands on the bus a few months ago. It will bubble its way down to semipro stuff in a couple of years. In five years, it will likely have replaced USB as the most common connector for external hard drives. It's that much better. And it has the backing of Intel....

So sure, it might be overkill. It's also the direction things are headed, so going with hardware that doesn't have TB could limit your ability to add stuff you might want in three or four years. I guess it really comes down to a question of how long you plan to keep using the laptop.

Don't think of USB 3.0 as being the way lots of stuff is going to be done in the future. Think of it as a technological dead end that Intel has decided to replace with something better. That should put TB in the correct perspective. :)
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ESATA is already replacing USB as the preferred method for connecting external hard drives. And it has the backing of pretty much everybody.
 
RWhite said:
ESATA is already replacing USB as the preferred method for connecting external hard drives. And it has the backing of pretty much everybody.
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I wish eSATA had caught on, but last I checked, most laptops still don't support it (and let's face it, the market for desktops is drying up). It's a decent protocol for hard drives, but it's not great for solid state drives, and that's the direction the industry is heading. The latest hard drive consolidation (WD bought Hitachi's drive division, Seagate bought Samsung's drive division) says that hard drive makers are not expecting traditional hard drive sales to be lucrative for much longer. Solid state storage is already starting to displace Winchester drives, and that's a trend that is likely to accelerate over the next 2-3 years.

The problem is that eSATA (and SATA in general) is not well suited to the needs of solid state storage; the protocol hides way too much from the OS, then uses hacks like TRIM to try to make up for it. I suspect that one could come up with a standard protocol for PCIe-attached storage that would absolutely slaughter eSATA for SSD purposes. Not to mention that you could do it with a lot less silicon and a lot fewer protocol translation layers if you did it right, thus leading to lower costs and lower latency. (Instead of going from PCIe to eSATA inside your computer and then having to decode that again, you could directly address the drive's silicon as a native PCIe device.) That would be a significant improvement over SATA, which still has to carry a lot of the legacy baggage of the original ATA protocol (polled I/O support, for example) for backwards compatibility reasons....

That said, in practice, there's probably not a huge advantage to the 40% speed boost that TB could provide over eSATA in terms of real-world customer needs, so it's kind of hard to say whether it will or won't displace it. I think it mostly depends on which one is cheaper to implement. Either way, USB 3.0 seems like a solution in search of a problem. :)
 
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dgatwood said:
I don't think I'd go that route. I love my H4n and all, but... well, how about pros and cons.

Pros:

  • Makes it easy to just hit a couple of buttons and start recording. I keep one on my piano for scratch recordings for this reason.
  • Very portable for the rare occasion when you need to do recording outside the studio.

Cons:

  • I have to leave it turned on because it actually takes longer to boot than my Mac!
  • It offers basically no editing capabilities except for punch in/out.
  • AFAIK, the punch in/out edits are destructive, making it difficult to get clean edits without a pop. (I've never tried it, mind you, but the problem is inherent to the concept of punch in/out unless you can slip and slide the new region slightly to minimize the waveform disruption and add a quick crossfade at both edit points.)
  • The pres are noticeably noisier than the pres in my MOTU audio interfaces (which, in turn, aren't my cleanest pres).

I'd personally find it way too limiting. YMMV.
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My mileage varies a little under the pros I do a lot of on site recordings and it's very easy to set up and go.

For the cons I do it a bit differently. I don't use the pres for I use a stereo microphone into a Joe Meek TwinQ then line in on the H4n. As well as defeating the on board microphones with a stereo aux send from the FOH console into the external Microphone input with a total of four channels, that is two stereo channels.

I always transfer the data to my computer to do all editing and mixing.

And I never timed the boot up. :)
 
I have a MacBook Pro - late 2009 model. I love it. I also have a Zoom R16. I love it, too.

I use Pro Tools 9. The Zoom R16 will work as an interface in Pro Tools 9. That gives you 8 inputs at 24/96. That said, I don't use it for that. I have a TC Electronics Impact Twin and yesterday my Mackie Blackbird arrived.

Anyway, I am mainly chiming in here to talk a but about the Zoom R16. I love this thing. Yes, it's preamps are not anywhere as nice as my Mackie, BUT:

* It's a standalone unit that can run off batteries, and still supply phantom power to 2 channels.
* I play in a punk band, and we play some sketchy dive bars that I am NOT taking my laptop into. For these venues, live recoding with the Zoom r16 is the way to go.
* It's got 2 built in mics, so worst case at a show, I put it on battery power and use the built in mics, ans still get the show recorded.
* It records to an SD card, which I can then pop into my Mac and load into Pro Tools to mix.

For $399 new, it's a steal.
 
I was on a pc for the last 7-8 years for recording. I recently got a Macbook Pro and couldn't be happier. It's ridiculously fast and everything runs smoother. Plus plugging and unplugging midi controllers is awesome. No Asio is needed because mac os has extremely low latency as is. I have turned on my pc's only a small handful of times since making the switch.
 
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