I would like to know this as well. Solid-state worth the extra money?

I dont know, but the limitations when I had just a single core 2.8ghz P4, did not stop me from making music. Often i'd have to freeze about 40-60% of the project to let the essentials channels stream through for mixing and arrangement. And you can always bounce to audio when your happy with a track/channel.

That said a Q9550 should be more than enough to handle anything you throw at it. Even the line just below it should be good to handle a majority of projects.

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commercial and underground electronic music (house/techno/trance/other) will surpass today's hip hop/pop/rock/country in worldwide interest...if it has'nt already.

Surely it depends entirely on which plugin/s you're using in a particular track. V-Station and a native Cubase reverb is not the same as running Synthsquad with a bit of TRacks compression with a bit of Redline Reverb over the top.

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