My Mac Studio is on the way… from China!

[cuttime]

Early is always good! Especially for Christmas!

[cuttime]

While you're setting everything up I might suggest clipboards and lab coats. Makes everything more efficient.

[James Steele]

While you're setting everything up I might suggest clipboards and lab coats. Makes everything more efficient.

Hahaha... maybe a helmet also, so I don't pull my hair out. No interface yet, but I can make sure things are working plugging headphones into the Mac Studio. So far installed all my Waves plugs (easy... dongle)... Toontrack EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer 3... gonna be a lost weekend for sure.

[James Steele]

As I recall, these run so hot to the touch that you may wish to think twice about keeping it. When I replaced my old 23" Studio Display, the energy savings paid for it in a few months—and the display looked a lot better.

That’s a good point. However I noticed Amazon dropped the price of the adapter to $60, so I went ahead and ordered it. Maybe I’ll get a new monitor someday but all the ones I looked at were 27” 2560x1440 instead of 30” 2560x1600. Plus I already have this one attached to a Kensington articulating arm with the cable threaded through it, so I’m going with the short term solution for now. Plus I like the color accuracy or this one. So I dunno. I’m rationalizing it… but I have to go with the cheaper solution for now. Although due to placement of Mac Studio, I’ll need a 6’ DVI extender cable too.

I ordered a Sonnet external PCIe chassis that should come today and I’ll find out if my UAD-2 DUO will work in it. All reports say it should.

Sonnet Echo Express SE1 Thunderbolt 3 Expansion Chassis (Echo-EXP-SE!-T3) https://a.co/d/3JIOG6F

[James Steele]

Addendum... the StarLink adapter arrived today as well as the DVI extender cable, and it was a bust. Returned them both to Amazon.

It's not that it didn't work. It appeared to work, but the old Apple Cinema Displays can be finicky. There's a tendency for little green streaks /noise and other artifacts to appear if you have large areas of black or very dark grey on the screen. Seems to be intermittent and also dependent on the particular graphics card they're connected to. Anyway... I was getting that problem with the adapter, so as I said, I've returned it.

Looks like I'm gonna have to throw some more money at the problem and get a new monitor. I'm also leery this time around about buying a monitor used off of CL, so looks like I'll have to pop for about $250 either with Amazon or Costco for a 27" 2560x1440 monitor. This is for my second monitor. I'm using a 43" Samsung 4K TV as my primary monitor. I'm a little bit bummed that I'm going to have to give up some pixels as the 30" Cinema Display had more pixels vertically (1600 versus 1440), but looks like that's just how it goes.

[mikehalloran]

Unless you are planning the monitor to be in the center, avoid ones with a wide, curved base like this:
https://smile.amazon.com/LG-27UL500-W- ... ref=sr_1_3

I made that mistake when ordering side monitors for my iMac Pro. Those bases hang off the front of your desk when those monitors are on the side and angled. Fortunately, I was able to return the two I bought and get monitors with compact bases that worked great.

This one is similar to the two I bought and hits all of the features I like incl. compact base, tilt and height adjustable, 4K, HDMI, DisplayPort and USB-C.
https://smile.amazon.com/LG-27UK670-B- ... ref=sr_1_9
No doubt, you can find all those features for less by shopping around.

[James Steele]

Thanks for the info, MIke. Well, I currently have my 30" Cinema Display mounted to an articulating Kensington monitor arm. The 30" Cinema is probably at the edge of the weight capacity of the arm, and I had to tighten it up a bit, but it's working. I ended up going with this LG monitor for $249:

https://www.costco.com/lg-32%22-class-q ... 93227.html

It's a 32" with 2560x1440 pixels, but thanks to its "borderless" on three sides design, it's actually not as tall (without the stand) and only a little bit wider than my existing Cinema Display, since the Cinema Display has pretty good sized borders/bezels. It's also significantly LIGHTER than the Cinema Display so it should work just fine on the articulating monitor arm.

The only minor inconvenience—if you could even call it that—is it only has HDMI inputs, (no DisplayPort or mDP), but I picked up one of these at Amazon which should let me hook it up to the Mac Studio:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07THJGZ9Z/

I just noticed the monitor says it has a 75Hz refresh rate, but I imagine it's possible to run it at 60Hz if I need to. This adapter is capable of 4k at 60Hz, so I suspect 2560x1440 at 75Hz *should* be doable. Oh well... if it doesn't work I can ALWAYS RETURN IT. I've never returned so many items since I've been getting this Mac Studio dialed in. I'm planning on getting a UAD2 TB3 Satellite soon as a few more checks come in.