Whats the Best PC for music prodution

[widdly]

I hate noisy PC's regardless of whether I'm recording or mixing. I've got my machine down so you can hardly tell it's turned on. It's easy to get obsessive about it though. You sort out one source of noise and the next loudest part starts to really annoy you.

If you go with onboard VGA you will have one less fan in the system so it will be quieter. Video cards use smaller fans which are noisier. It will also use less power and generate less heat so less noise from the other fans in the system.

There are some Addyson PSU at Sim Lim that are very quiet and much cheaper than a lot of other brands. It's also using temperature controlled fans. It's not modular but for the price it's pretty good.

If your hard drives make too much noise you can suspend them using elastic ( get some from spotlight). It stops the mechanical vibrations being transferred to the case. Another idea is to sit you pc case on some rubber to mechanically isolate it from the floor.

silentpcreview.com has loads of reviews and articles on this stuff.

 

[Angeldevimon]

thx a bunch! how bout mixers? Do i need a sound card or an audio interface or mixer ( am i even making sense lol) . Tot sound card is required to get sound out from the computer?

 

[kongwee]

For me, Audio Interface is better. Soundcard no matter how well the design the CPU inside will degrade the sound. Unless you talk about system like Protools HD, which need to stream multitrack from their outboard unit to the CPU by a PCI card.

 

[Cheez]

Most motherboards come with integrated audio interfaces, so you shouldn't need to get a separate soundcard. You just need to know that consumer "soundcards" are still needed play those midi sounds that some software/program occasionally uses. In a sense, they are also "sound generators" ie generate sound. Pro audio interfaces do not have integrated sound generators.

I would suggest to get an audio interface like Echo Gina 3G. In your dual booted system, the boot partition that you are using for your everyday use should have that audio interface disabled. In the DAW boot partition, disable the integrated soundcard that's in your motherboard.

 

[kongwee]

Most motherboards come with integrated audio interfaces, so you shouldn't need to get a separate soundcard. You just need to know that consumer "soundcards" are still needed play those midi sounds that some software/program occasionally uses. In a sense, they are also "sound generators" ie generate sound. Pro audio interfaces do not have integrated sound generators.

Still got people use onboard Midi meh? I thought is the Micro$oft wave generator or something. No longer on hardware.

 

[Cheez]

Microsoft uses Roland wavetable, I believe. I believe Creative may still use soundfonts.

 

[blueprintstudios]

I used to use that onboard MS midi sound module just for simple piano triggering. but after that replaced with a lite free vst cos of the terrible latency

 

[gutturalpiss]

Still got people use onboard Midi meh? I thought is the Micro$oft wave generator or something. No longer on hardware.

Yes, that is Software Synthesis (virtual MIDI device; notice the "SW" in "Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth"), as opposed to Hardware Synthesis (any sound card claiming to have a MIDI synthesizer). 95% of all onboard/integrated audio solutions have NO hardware MIDI capability. All the gaming cards and SBLive/Audigy probably do, though.

Hardware MIDI is essentially just a ROM onboard the sound card holding a sound bank, just like your average keyboard (the keyboard itself is the controller, which passes MIDI to the tone generator/synthesizer that has the ROM with the sound bank). Since we already have computers powerful enough to hold sound banks of a few hundred MBs in memory, I consider sound cards with "hardware MIDI" a deprecated technology.