Spec me a recording studio setup

RetiredGreyFox · 1 Oct 2006 at 20:01

I want to chuck out all our old gear in the studio and replace it with a PC setup.
The software will be SONAR and the mixer will be a Phonic Helix Board 18 FireWire. The reason for the Phonic is that it can stream 16 tracks through the Firewire connection onto 16 individual tracks on SONAR.

My question is :
Which processor can handle 16 tracks at once?
If you're positive that a P4 3ghz or AMD 3000+ can handle 16 tracks then that will be what I'd build.
However, do you think that more power would be needed?

semi-pro waster · 1 Oct 2006 at 22:26

Probably the more power that you can afford to buy the better, having had a look at the site for the software. It appears that it supports dual core and the recommended CPU is in the order of 2.8ghz with 1gb Ram so I'd probably suggest a system based on a low end Conroe e.g. a 6300/6400 and 2gb Ram as well as possibly multiple fast hard drives (maybe the Seagate 7200.10 range) but all this depends on your budget.

I'm afraid I don't know much about this area so this is largely guesswork but maybe someone else can help further hopefully.

RetiredGreyFox · 1 Oct 2006 at 22:35

Thanks.

I already use SONAR on a P4 3.6 system but my worry is the 16 simultaneous recorded tracks.
The Conroe you suggested would be out of the price range.

digitalis · 3 Oct 2006 at 11:09

For recording, the 16 simultaneous tracks will be determined by the throughput to the hard drive more than the cpu (especially in this case, as the firewire interface is doing all the audio capture work) - try it out on your current system first, as that should let you know what's needed in the studio one.

S.

MattJones2k6 · 3 Oct 2006 at 11:11

For editing like that might be worth faster hdd's like SCSI ...

Or just the raptor hdd series 10k RPM ..

RetiredGreyFox · 3 Oct 2006 at 16:53

Thats a good idea Digitalis and I have Firewire and a Raptor has my main drive.
The P4 system has no problems playing back up to 24 tracks of wav files so recording 16 tracks shouldn't be a problem I suppose.

cleanbluesky · 3 Oct 2006 at 17:07

dmpoole said:
I want to chuck out all our old gear in the studio and replace it with a PC setup.
The software will be SONAR and the mixer will be a Phonic Helix Board 18 FireWire. The reason for the Phonic is that it can stream 16 tracks through the Firewire connection onto 16 individual tracks on SONAR.

My question is :
Which processor can handle 16 tracks at once?
If you're positive that a P4 3ghz or AMD 3000+ can handle 16 tracks then that will be what I'd build.
However, do you think that more power would be needed?

I think a 3ghz shoud be able to handle that, without effects...

It would depend more on the other components, becasue the hard-drives would reach a bottleneck for recording and playback before the CPU would...