Help me out here dudes!

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Fender

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Hi there. This message is simmilar to a message I posted I while back, but now things have changed. I couldn't tak it any more and went out and got a $3000.00 Loan! (Canadian) I am planning on using this money for my 'studio'. This is what I have allready:

Mackie 1202
AKG C1000's
AKG K240 monitor headphones
Darla Card (2ins/8outs)

Now, I don't want to go spend this money on crap, I want to get the best I can for the money and do it the right way! :D These are the items I'm buying for sure:

1. New computer -- (Pentium II 400mhz, 96mb ram, etc.) Or a mac. (suggestions?)
2. Audio-Technica 4033 condensor mic (love this one!)

Now, that uses about $2000.00 allready, what do you suggest now? I allready have cubase with some reverd plugin's, etc. I don't know what way to go, studio monitors, or tube pre's, or outboard gear?? Ahhh, I just don't know. I just want to know the best way to go. I will be allways upgrading so I want some of the best stuff at the start. Okay, I'm babbling on... Please I want to hear ALL of your suggestions. Thanx.

Adam.
 
I'm going to take some pity on you, Fender, because you will be paying that loan back for some time (hopefully not too long, but take some financial advice and get it paid off ASAP if it's a real live interest-bearing loan or it will quickly suck all your money down).

STOP! Don't buy that 400PII. True, I have exactly one of those myself, but that was before the new Celerons came out. You can get a faster machine and pay less for it with the newer Celerons, even not overclocked. If you're not a computer jock, find a techie store up there that knows what this is all about.

Since you have effects plugins I suggest getting good monitors next. Forget tube pres as you will already have pristine sound on your Mackie and you can warm it up with DirectX plugins. But nothing can replace a set of monitors!

This is my last post for a week or so because I'm about to go to NYC for Internet World and my annual pilgrimage to 48th St.
 
Whoa there. Celeron's WERE the shit for a while there...INCREDIBLE bang for the buck, espically if you got an original 300A AND knew how to overclock.

However, PII chips are falling so damn fast that there's little reason to buy a Celeron for financial reasons. I recently bought one, but that's because I'm a SERIOUS tightass and wanted to save the measely 40 bucks.

Fender, if you've already got the load and are going to purchase a PC, then go for the PII. While internally the PII and Celeron are VERY similar, the PII has a 100Mhz FSB...no overclocking required. The Celeron of course runs at 66MhzFSB.

Also realize that Celerons (along with all new Intel chips) have fixed clock mulitipliers which means that the only way you can overclock them is by adjusting the system bus speed. This is problematic because adjusting the bus speed results in HUGE changes to the clock speed as well as a potential speed increases of your PCI bus. *note that overclocking nullifies your warranty as well*

Another thing you must consider is that you MUST get a SLOT1 motherboard if you eventually want to go to a PII or a PIII. Slot1 Celerons are getting harder to find (of course you can mess with adapters). You won't have to worry about a thing if you just go with the PII.

Also, if you purchase a Celeron system from a local company you can also bank on the fact that they'll stick you with PC66 SDRAM which will not work when you upgrade to the PII.

Now, if you can find an old 300A SLOT1 Celeron, you're probably going to be able to crank it up to 450Mhz on a 100Mhz FSB (~4.5Mhz multiplier). WOW! That's GREAT! How much dough have I saved????!!!

Not enough my friend. PIII prices are dropping drastically and PII prices are LOW LOW LOW.

Here are some current prices from pricewatch.com:

PII-400Mhz OEM = $133
PII-450Mhz OEM = $163
PIII-450Mhz OEM = $167
Celeron-300A SLOT1 OEM = $71
Celeron-400Mhz OEM = $88
Celeron-433Mhz OEM = $95
Celeron-466Mhz PPGA OEM = $86

Now we're talking about a $40 to $60 savings if you go with a Celeron. That's not much my friend, when you consider that the CPU is THE most important thing in your computer, especially for HD recording.

Noticing a couple things from those prices; the PIII 450 looks like a good buy, and the cheap 466Mhz celeron will require a $15 PPGA to SLOT1 adapter to run on a SLOT1 motherboard...WHICH YOU NEED.

Whew, got all that? Don't buy a Celeron system and don't get duped into an AMD system. (my performance shot up using n-Track when I went from an AMD K6-2 400 to a Celeron 400 so drastically that I no longer wince when I hit the record button)

If I were you and had an extra $1000 to spend, I'd stick quite a bit of it into the PC. Get a second large 7200RPM UDMA/66 hard drive. Get a UDMA/66 controller. Get a nice removable disk system for archiving. Get a 19" monitor. Etc.

My two cents anyway....(slightly biased as I am a certified geek :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
Excellent post Slackmaster2K! I'm broke, but still learned alot!
 
In addition to the clock speed of PII and PIII chips, they also have 512K of cache, where the Celeron chips only have 128K. When you start getting into Direect-X you will get better performance out of a the PII & PIII. The PIII is supposed to be even more geared for Direct-X than the PII.

Now only if the software out there could catch up to the hardware technology.
 
Fishmed Said:
//Now only if the software out there could //catch up to the hardware technology.

SHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Fishmed, dude, don't say that too loud! :) Have we forgotten about the late 486 - early Pentium days where only the fastest computers could run the latest software? Software was well ahead of hardware up until about a few years ago, and now the tides have turned to some degree.

You can actually run your $1000 brand new computer for a year or more without checking the requirements on the back of your software! Just wait, it won't be long before some new graphic or audio software technology comes creeping along that is so great you just have to have it, but is so intense that it'll only run on dual PIII sytems :) Knock on wood.

Thanks for adding the bit about the cache! And I hope that the PIII really deserves its own "generation". While it's obvious that the PII is worlds beyone the Pentium, I don't see that gap between the PII and PIII. Even Intel seems to be having a hard time with marketing the thing..."speed up your internet"....what a joke! AMD did the same thing with their K6-3 chip which is nearly identical to the K6-2 and was introduced to kill some time until the Athalon came out....which appears to be similar to Intel's Xeon chip (2MB cache) minus the FPU. "We've decided not to optimize the FPU. Instead, we'll include 10 new proprietary 3D-ish instructions that will squeeze an extra frame out of Quake2." :) Sorry, I'm a disgruntled ex-AMD user.

Slackmaster 2000
 
BEWARE..... event cards are ment to be run at 66 mhz. I had problems with my Gina and Event told me that all their products are ment for 66 mhz not 75/83/100 buss.
I went back to the 66 and all my problems stopped. If the increased buss is a must then the Event cards are not for you! Also I use a AMD processor with 160 megs of ram and get 24 tracs of excellent audio (44.1/16 bit) or 18 tracs of 48/32 bit. I would look at the benchmarks on the AMD/Intell comparisons before buying. the AMD are much cheeper if you are on a budget this my help you and still get the job done very well. Also before buying the AT4033 try the CAD- E200. I had a AT and sold it to get the E200.
The E200 is multipattern (fig 8, card, omni)
and has a "warmer" tone than the AT.
Bang for the buck this mic is more versitle
in a studio envir. Monitors, monitors, monitors! A good set of monitors are hard to beat! A small tube pre would also help and can double as a DI - this is worth the $$.
Also if you really want to make a difference in your mix, check out the Behringer Ultrafex pro. This unit is real cool and offers real nice things for you mix (I mix with one all the time now - big difference)
And the cost is cheap!
Hope this helps
KGMET
 
KGMET:
I don't know about that information regarding Event cards and the 100MHz FSB. Does that refer to Event cards in an AMD platform only?
This sounds strikingly similar to what I was told by Adaptec Tech help when my Philips CD burner stopped working upon being transferred from my P90 to my PII-450. They told me that my PC was writing to the CDR too fast for it to keep up. Paul Bunyan would have had trouble coming up with a taller tale. The real story turned out to be massive amounts of cat hair and a blank CDR jammed up inside the CDR, which led to its demise. It still reads, but the write function is no more. I'm currently running my Gina with a 100MHz FSB (PII-450/128MB RAM) and it works great. 36 tracks of 16bit/44.1KHz audio.
BTW- don't trust those numbers you get from the Echo Reporter. It's a good utility to get a rough idea of what you'll be able to do before buying the card. Once you've bought the card, just keep adding tracks until you hear your system stutter. That's your track limit.
 
I can only tell you what they (tech support)
told me. I made the switch and all was well. they stated that this is common with the cards and they designed the chip set to work with 66. Your correct the Echo reporter
is a tool for information. the tracs I stated are real world tracs not from echo reporter. I do not think this only AMD because we spoke about Intell and Cyrix CPU's. The 66 info was food for thought
and he might want to talk to event.
Tech support was been wrong before!
I know others who had the same problem
but it was also with AMD and Cyrix CPU's.
My point is other platforms do work
and it depends on what he hopes to obtain
from the workstation based on budget vs. performance.
 
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