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Windows laptop for production on the road
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| djnitride |
First of all, don't want this to turn into a mac vs PC thread, please keep that out of here.
Seems there isn't much of a consensus on good Windows laptops for music productions because of three factors.
1. DPC latency
If you get a system that has driver issues it can result in high/spiking DPC latency meaning you get all kinds of nasty pops in playback. I have experienced this firsthand on certain brands of laptops. These are rarely if ever fixed by the manufacturers of the laptop.
2. ASIO support
Mostly fixed by ASIO4ALL
3. Decent builtin audio chipset
Yeah, I could just use an external audio interface but that would be less portable. Its nice to have a good internal audio interface to reduce the amount of equipment I have to carry. Cheap run of the mill realtek chipsets simply are not an option here.
Any suggestions? I have been looking at ASUS N56JN http://www.asus.com/us/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/N56JN/ but I can't seem to figure out what type of audio chipset it actually uses.
If you have had good luck with a specific model or brand I would love to hear about it :) |
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| Looney4Clooney |
the only advice i can give anyone going on tour in good conscious is don't use a pc. PC laptop just makes my mind implode. Sorry.
And no, you will not find any laptop ( PC ) that has an asio friendly internal interface. It doesn't exist. If it does, it costs more than a mac.
I didn't want to go there but its the only place to o. PCs can work. You have to be avolutely mental to use a pc laptop with the actual internal sound interface. |
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| djnitride |
| quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
the only advice i can give anyone going on tour in good conscious is don't use a pc. PC laptop just makes my mind implode. Sorry.
And no, you will not find any laptop ( PC ) that has an asio friendly internal interface. It doesn't exist. If it does, it costs more than a mac.
I didn't want to go there but its the only place to o. PCs can work. You have to be avolutely mental to use a pc laptop with the actual internal sound interface. |
This isn't for touring and I doubt it will ever be. If I was I might consider a mac in all honesty just for the overall stability. I am traveling much more often for work these days and when I have been collaborating with people in my area I don't want to lug around a 10+ pound tower, monitor, etc. Not to mention when I go out and do field recording in remote locations its easier for me to go through the recorded sounds while I am there and have the recording fresh in my mind.
L4C, macs literally cost 100% more then the equivalent PC laptop when comparing the hardware 1:1. I don't want to settle for a small amount of ram (4GB) and a dual core i5 for $1000 when I could get 16GB of ram and an i7 for the same price. I am potentially going to be running CPU/memory intensive plugins (Diva for one) so raw compute performance is a big deal here.
I have an external interface I could use (Zoom H6), so I suppose there is that. But then again, the DPC boogieman may strike and render it useless :( |
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| djnitride |
| You know what L4C, I have been looking for close to 8 hours now at various laptops, reading customer reviews and looking at specs. They all sacrifice something major or have some glaring problem I simply don't want to deal with. I am this close to buying macbook pro. |
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| Raphie |
| buy a Dell M3800, crushes any macbook pro on specs and price and yes works fine with A4All touchscreen works great with your DAW too |
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| djnitride |
Took a look at that Raphie and some similar models and while they looked nice I ended up caving to the dark side.
I ended up buying the latest Haswell Dual Core i5 13" Retina Macbook Pro with 8 gigs of ram and a 256 gig SSD.
Seems to handle all my plugins just fine and everything just works. Rumored to have over 10 hours of battery life (some people reported up to 13). Doesn't generate much heat which is nice. When I first saw it I honestly thought they had handed me a Macbook Air by mistake but apparently them being super thin started with the Retina models.
Really happy with the purchase so far even though it was $1500, didn't realize how nice it would be all around to use! |
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| optik |
get a macbook pro and bootcamp it - best solution. Get a student friend to buy it for a 17% discount. It'll last three years certainly. Build quality is amazing.
if not, lenovo do some great £500 laptops.
it doesn't matter that much these days, they can all do the job. |
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| midge |
I roll with a high spec ASUS laptop.
To be honest I love it. it is great!
Sometimes when my productions become pretty dense it does start glitching but I try do to everything in my DAW and computer settings to maximize performance but for me it is all about ASUS! |
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| tehlord |
| quote: | Originally posted by djnitride
I ended up buying the latest Haswell Dual Core i5 13" Retina Macbook Pro with 8 gigs of ram and a 256 gig SSD.
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Those i5 dual cores aren't really that good for music production. Can you cancel the order?
You really need a quad. |
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| djnitride |
| quote: | Originally posted by tehlord
Those i5 dual cores aren't really that good for music production. Can you cancel the order?
You really need a quad. |
I tested a few plugins on a friends older model before I bought it and found it acceptable.
My workflow is somewhat strange in that I freeze most of my tracks even on my 4.5 GHZ quad i7 desktop where I don't need to due to a bug in Reaper/Omnisphere's offline rendering.
Most Omnisphere presets I tried didn't push CPU farther than two percent total usage. Diva in Divine mode with a bunch of voices didn't push it to 10% total usage on most presets.
I should be ok for the foreseeable future at least for my needs. |
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| DJ RANN |
Honestly, you made the right choice.
People just don't really get it until you really use both to actually experience the difference.
Specs don't = specs when it comes to OSX vs W7/W8.
It's just shortsighted to look at the specs of a PC and go "rar! moar pow7r! Windaz FTW" (etc). Mac's as a complete system are based of a completely different efficiency method.
I some ways you need beefier CPUs and more ram in PC's just to deal with the inherently bloated platform of windows.
I have a two year old ASUS (fairly top spec) that is literally falling apart on my. I've had to replace (at my cost) the keyboard, repair the trackpad, replace the screen and the corner housing is cracked.
Now granted, I'm not gentle with my stuff, but apart from just normal daily use, there's simply nothing that should warrant this level of injury.
A mate, who owns a 2007 macbook pro, is way less computer savvy, went backpacking across asia with it and hasn't done any fixes, still uses every day and honestly it's in better shape than my two year old Asus.
The dell m3800 is nice, but at $1800 starting price for the base model isn't great value for a dell. I also have extensive experiencing speccing dells for Audio consultancy I used to run and although you can't say they're made badly, they're not made very well. My overall opinion is that they are very average, decent value PC's.
You buy a mac, pay the highest spec one you can, and then simply don't worry about performance for 5 years. You just get on with producing. |
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| tehlord |
| quote: | Originally posted by djnitride
I tested a few plugins on a friends older model before I bought it and found it acceptable.
My workflow is somewhat strange in that I freeze most of my tracks even on my 4.5 GHZ quad i7 desktop where I don't need to due to a bug in Reaper/Omnisphere's offline rendering.
Most Omnisphere presets I tried didn't push CPU farther than two percent total usage. Diva in Divine mode with a bunch of voices didn't push it to 10% total usage on most presets.
I should be ok for the foreseeable future at least for my needs. |
You need to test it under multi channel load.
Because it can't spread the load out over 4 or more cores it starts to crap out really fast.
I had a 2.5ghz Mac Mini which was fine with a Sylenth based project, but could only handle 4-5 instances of Massive before it ran out of ideas.
If you do in fact freeze everything then you might be ok, but just be aware that the dual core i5's can go from ok to maxed out really quick. |
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