celeron or pentium?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fab4ever
  • Start date Start date
I'm fairly certain that one of the more widely recomended and used compressor plug-ins was, and probably still is, dithering everything going through it to 16 bits. Nobody seems to notice.

How do I know this. Well, I set the compressor to flat, routed a 24 bit signal through it, inverted it and summed it back with the original, then boosted the crap out of it to see if anything was down there. (this is childs play in Cool Edit which is a tremendous signal analysis tool). What I found is about 8 bits worth of hiss-like noise.

I wouldn't be at all suprised if some of the plug-ins people comonly use aren't turning their 24 bit recordings into 16 bits on them and they never knew it. At the very least I never assume plug-ins work as expected I check them if at all possible.

As for Celeron... I used to have troubles with it and Cakewalk when I was evaluating it. Switching to a slightly faster Pentium it made a significan't difference (I'd quess as much as 50% faster). That was back when version 8 had just come out. I can't really account for such a big difference, but there it was.
 
Again, thanks for all the comments. Lots of food for thought.

(And yes Ola, surfing at work is indeed what I'm doing - and will be for a while, as the home PC is in the shop getting a Pentium III 750 slapped in there. Luckily I had already replaced the mother board so I'm okay there)

I'm gonna spend some time experimenting at 24/48 - really listening to my results. I suspect I'll be very happy, particularly once I get the new processor working.

Thanks again for all the advice!
 
ola?

ola said:


control panel -> system -> hardware (or device manager) -> hard drives.

There should be a checkbox for DMA. Make sure it's checked.
Click to expand...

What does that do? I went there to check it out and after I checked it, a warning came up about could cause crap to the hard drive? Does this help with the CPU power?
 
DMA - Direct Media Access allows various devices to speak directly with eachother without having the CPU handling the transfer. Thus, it decreses the CPU load and increases the transfer rate.

However, back in ye olde days, this was risky as some devices couldn't handle this properly. That's why you get the warning. I have never run into any problems with DMA though.

Note that all (both) devices on your IDE channel must support in order to use it. If you HDD supports DMA (which it does) and you have a CD on the same IDE channel, it must support DMA as well. I presume that you won't be allowed to select DMA mode if both devices doesn't support it. Maybe you can and maybe that's another reason for that scary warning you get.

Enable DMA or you'll never get any good transfer rates on your HDD.

/Ola
 
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