[MPA] Sound Studio Advice Needed

[Alan Taylor]

Generally speaking, Macs are substantially quieter than PCs.

There was one recent Mac, I think it was the original G5 tower, which 
was very noisy and that attracted a great deal of criticism but Apple 
revised the design and dealt with the problem.

Apple have always taken acoustic noise levels very seriously. After the 
bondi blue iMac, G3 iMacs had no cooling fan. The new G5 iMacs have a 
very sophisticated cooling system to minimise noise - which is very 
important if the whole computer sits a foot in front of your face.

In a studio context, I would hope that you have no equipment with 
cooling fans or hard disks in an area where microphones are used. 
Whatever manufacturers claim, they are not silent. Even transformers in 
power supplies and lighting fittings have been found to vibrate and be 
audible.

Presumably you're concerned about acoustic noise within the control 
room. I would have thought that the ideal solution is to put all 
equipment with fans into racks that have doors ( with the rack being 
independently ventilated ). That way it's accessible but not audible.

Much depends on the level that you monitor at. At high levels, even a 
quite noisy PC isn't troublesome, but at low levels, you can hear all 
sorts of things.

I'm puzzled why your colleague is so keen on PCs for audio.  OS X has 
many advantages for high quality audio and the new version of OS X will 
further strengthen support for pro audio.

Alan


On Thursday, Sep 16, 2004, at 02:33 Europe/London, Cass Carlos wrote:

> Sounds great! Please keep us updated, if you wouldn't mind.
>
> On 15/09/2004, at 5:21 PM, Richard Edwards wrote:
>
>> Hiya folks.....
>>
>> I'm in the process of setting up a Sound Studio [in London]  from 
>> scratch and as a long time user of Mac would like it to be Mac based. 
>> The purposes of the Studio are to build a sound fx library, make some 
>> music :) live and synthetic and mixed and to dub voices to Film as 
>> well as add FX to film,we plan a voice booth, a small live area for 
>> up to 7 musicians with a drum area, two mixing suites and some 
>> storage. But we don't know a lot about what to put in the space :)
>>
>> A colleague has proposed a PC based system [ I won't be doing that 
>> :)] but he also raised the issue of whether the Mac we choose may be 
>> noisy ? CAn anyone help me with the some advice on how to keep down 
>> noise and is the Mac especially noisy ?
>>
>> Can anyone recommend what Mac to go with [Box G5 ? new cool G5?] and 
>> what the a 'dream' set up might be - eg Pro Tools, Logic Audio etc ?
>>
>> While wanting to be wise and economical we are not constrained by any 
>> budget limitations which makes a big change ....
>>
>> I'll be glad to supply any more info required and biGGG  biGG txs in 
>> advance for any suggestions
>>
>> Richard
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>
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