Sweetwater Creation Stations

[Zed10R]

Sup all. I'm days away from upgrading my 6 year old pc to something current. Does anyone have any experince with creation stations? What makes a $1000CS worth that money when you can get an HP with better specs, more RAM and bigger hard drive? Is it service? I know Sweetwater is supposed to have fantastic customer service. Would that make the deal worth it?

 

[bigwillz24]

Sup all. I'm days away from upgrading my 6 year old pc to something current. Does anyone have any experince with creation stations? What makes a $1000CS worth that money when you can get an HP with better specs, more RAM and bigger hard drive? Is it service? I know Sweetwater is supposed to have fantastic customer service. Would that make the deal worth it?

Try looking up the parts in one. I can almost guarantee you you will spec out better and cheaper if you build it yourself.

 

[dachay2tnr]

An off the shelf HP or Dell is not going to built from the ground up for recording. So some of what you are paying for is the customization. The other part is simply that Sweetwater (or anyone building DAWs) does not have the volume levels of a Dell or HP. Another part is the big guys usually end up using proprietary (and cheap) parts - meaning they are difficult or expensive to upgrade/repair down the road.

That said, as bigwilliz indicated, you can save money over a Sweetwater (but not below an HP or Dell) by doing it yourself. Of course, that assumes you have some knowledge and experience with computers. If you end up frying a microprocessor or a Mobo, Sweetwater is going to look cheap.

 

[Hard2Hear]

*cough cough*
http://www.adkproaudio.com/compete.cfm

 

[Zed10R]

Thanks!! I really appreciate the fedback. This is a big deal for me.

I was also finding that Windows XP seems to be preferred still. Have other found poor support for Vista drivers?

 

[peritus]

https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=249654

 

[RandyW]

I really think if you have to ask this question you would probably be much
better off going with one of Sweetwaters systems.
The ones you get at the discount stores are going to come with tons of
garbage that will just get in your way. You spend hours if not days trying
to get rid of this junk and then more time optimizing it and loading your
required software. It can be extremely time consuming reloading newer
or older OS's and trying to find software that my not even exist.
After 9 months of toiling with Vista I finally switched to XP64 only to load
my Sonar 7 and see a message that they no longer support XP64 ;P.

Then again if you can build it yourself or have a friend do it for you
you could probably save a few bucks.

 

[dementedchord]

IMO... it's definately worth having it configured by someone that knows recording... the machine i'm using now was built for me by a gamer buddy of my nephew... and probably screams at doom .... but we present some pretty specific problems to a machine and it took me forever to undo some of that crap...

 

[Guitwizz]

Try audeum audio pc's.

Hes a pc freak and a musician, and his prices are a bit lower for better specs than sweetwater.

I remember looking at sweetwater last year sometime, and their base box was a single core, 512 RAM and a single 200Gig HD, and it was around 1100 bux!

I dont care how well you put together an audio machine, thats just silly!

 

[RezN8]

There are many companies offering turnkey solutions built specifically for audio. I suggest you do some research and find out what most others are charging before you decide.

Here are just two examples:

http://www.shop-sonica.com/?gclid=CNqC9OPUmI8CFSDiQQodL3uhUA

http://www.rainrecording.com

Some companies offer unlimited support and can even fix your computer probs (if any) via internet connection. I think it is actually worth it to have one built for you if you are not computer savvy to begin with. But definitely check out a few companies to compare with Sweetwater's deal.

 

[Zed10R]

*cough cough*
http://www.adkproaudio.com/compete.cfm

I looked around and got me a system from these guys. It's a damn good system and those guys really know what they are doing. And..of course...the price was good.

I highly recomend ADK to anyone looking to upgrade their system.

 

[Toddskins]

New USB spec v.3

Intel is going to release the new USB 3.0 in the first half of 2008. 10x faster than USB 2.0, ---- that's 5Mb/sec.

Runs on copper and/or fiber, and backwards compatible.


So, as you know, a computer is only as fast as its slowest link, which has always been the hard drive.

There are some new hard drives out now called Hybrids, which have like 8 GB of Ram cache, that are much faster, though they seem to be unheard by the big manufacturers, i.e. HP, Dell.

Save up for these now, and spend the next few months developing better compositions and arranging your music. No hurry to record, is there?

 

[Zed10R]

How many of really need the latest and the greatest?? If your work isn't being hindered by your hardware, what use it is to spend big $$ on the fanciest new toys?

 

[Hard2Hear]

I looked around and got me a system from these guys. It's a damn good system and those guys really know what they are doing. And..of course...the price was good.

I highly recomend ADK to anyone looking to upgrade their system.

Hey Zed, whats your real name? You may have talked to me.

fyi on USB3, theres not going to be pro audio devices that work with it for some time. Think how long Firewire actually existed before there were any firewire interfaces that worked decently. There's not even any devices that use USB2 properly yet. No one should hedge their bets on USB3 for content creation for some time.

 

[Zed10R]

Hey Zed, whats your real name? You may have talked to me.

Tim S....and you are???

Seriously...my new rig kicks ass.....what used to take a couple hours takes a couple minutes.....I lOVE it.

one thing that is a bit challenging is getting DKFH to work with the ASIO drivers. On my old machine it was a plug in...on the new one it's been configured to run stand alone, and that threw me a bit....still trying to get it right....it appears to work completely differently...but it still kicks much ass.

 

[Hard2Hear]

Aah! you DID talk to me. Its Mike.

Look under insert ->softsynths and look under vstplugins. you should find dkfh in there.

Glad you like it!

 

[Zed10R]

Hard2Hear knows his shit, folks....