Is this gonna work?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Natural Gass
  • Start date Start date
N

Natural Gass

New member
I've been playing guitar for a 1/4 century and recording on 4-track for many years - man I'm getting old! But my style is still rock and preferably hard...Here's the thing, I may have the opportunity to buy a used Compaq Professional Workstation AP 500. It has a:

Pentium II 450 processor
128 MB RAM
9 GB Ultra SCSI Hard Drive
standard soud blaster card
hp cd-writer 9100

I get decent sounding recordings from my old 4-track using a Joe Meek, SM-57, berringer condenser mic and a peavey power mixer. But, I'd like to make the jump to digital. Is it worth buying this machine for recording guitar, bass, vocals? I don't think I'd want to pay much over $125 for it since its about 4 years old. Is that reasonable?

Is it gonna have enough power to do the job or will it end up being a disappointment and have to put a bunch of $ into it to bring it up to speed?.

Will I be better off sticking to my 4-track and keep waiting for some $ to fall into my pocket so I can buy a new computer dedicated to recording or should I take a chance of this?

Thanks, I'd appreciate any advice...
 
Welcome to the board Natural Gass,

I've seen many guys reporting that they can record digitally with as slow as a P2 333. I guess it depends on how many simultaneous tracks you want to record, or in other words how much you need to load your CPU. Most people however seem to go along the lines of a PIII 500 or so being your minimum processor requirement.

Do you know what kind of memory. Memory size is not the only limiting factor. It also has to be fast enough. Usual recommendation is DDR memory (PC2100).

A 9 GB drive will capture a decent amount of audio, especially if you're not heavily multitracking, but you will want to get a bigger disk later for sure. HDD upgrades are not TOO outrageous, though SCSI is still a bit pricey but definitely fast enough. The new ATA 100 and ATA 133 IDE derives are also fast enough and cheaper.

Sound Blaster is not the best for recording nor is it recommended by most on this board, but again it depends on how heavily you want to tax your system. If you want great quality you will need to invest in a new sound card and interface.

There are a bunch of threads here that talk about these kinds of issues if you do a bit of searching (especially in this forum). Some go into costs and specs on building a system from the ground up, highly recommended if you want a great DAW only system.

So I'm sure I didn't help too much. Many factors involved. How are your analog 4 track recordings turning out? Also depends on how much you willing to invest. If your recordings are acceptable you might want to start saving and do some more research to build the right machine to get into the digital game. Hope I didn't waste your time with this post? :)
 
I've done a lot of work on a PII 350 and you should be fine... depending on how heavy you get with the real time fx. 128 megs of ram is a good start. You may want to upgrade. SCSI HD's kick ass and are relatively cheap. You could get into another 9 gig for less than $50 off of ebay. The major upgrade you would HAVE TO DO is get a decent sound card. Do you plan on recording to the PC direct or mixing down from another source? People around here might laught at a PII, but keep in mind that only 5 years ago, PII 450's were the bomb. And like I said, I did a lot of heavy duty recording/mixing on a PII 350 PLUS video!
 
I've logged a ton of hours on a PII 450 with 128 ram. It'll work just fine for you, and it's a good price for the system.

As far as being dissapointed, there's a couple of things to mention:

1) Better sound quality than a Tascam 4 track? Hell yes. Better than a Studer 4 track? Hell no. You'd have to invest in a much better card to even come close.

2) If you're going to ask the computer to do a ton of effects processing (on the fly), you're going to run into problems. 2 or 3 effects inserts each on 12 tracks is going to be a problem. There are workarounds though (like printing the effects to the track, or "destructive" effects).

Sounds like you've been at it a while and have a decent handle on recording. Changing over to the PC will have it's share of learning curve too, but it'll probably go a lot easier without the need to learn the basics.

...and welcome to the party :)
 
Thanks for your responses. Actually I screwed up in my 1st post - the hard drive is 4 GB not 9 GB. Which isn't that large in today's standards.

It sounds like the processing speed and memory will do all right for recording 2 tracks (stereo) simultaneously. The sound card & hard disk will probably need upgrading. I just don't know if I want to get a used machine and put any $ into upgrading it. A geek can probably get a pretty good new unit for around $500 these days. Problem is I don't have $500 and probably won't until the stock market improves (a bunch).

Thanks for your input, peace...
 
My Dad is a certified reseller and service center for those compaq pro series. And while I would do anything in my power to discourage one from buying a retail compaq, I'm told the pro's are really good machines. For $125 it sounds like a really good deal, especially if you don't have $500. It kinda makes it your only option for daw recording. When you can afford it just get some more memory, and if you were to get one of the rackmount firewire sound interfaces it would be easy to connect to practically any computer. Cuz your gonna want something better than SB. It'll work till you upgrade though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top