New iMacs!

[James Steele]

I finally had time to go over the printed specs while flying back from L.A. this weekend. These are impressive new releases -- probably more so than any in years. It's now a very hard argument to go for a Mac Pro, unless one needs the slots for UAD etc.

Does the "etc." include a 424 card connected to an HD192 and 24 I/O all wired into my studio? Because really with my investment in PCI audio interfaces, I think I'm better off with a Mac Pro and upgrading to a PCIe-424 card.

[mhschmieder]

Hmm, does MOTU have incentives for the PCIe transition like some of the other vendors? Not that I can ever remember whether PCIe or PCI-X is current, since I've never owned a tower.

Certainly when one is invested in audio boards, that is the same category as UAD in terms of being invested in towers (or maybe ExpressCard adaptors for MacBook Pro's as well, in some cases).

[Alan Craig]

Does the "etc." include a 424 card connected to an HD192 and 24 I/O all wired into my studio? Because really with my investment in PCI audio interfaces, I think I'm better off with a Mac Pro and upgrading to a PCIe-424 card.

My guess is that "big rigs" will always need card slots for the myriad of hardware choices that a large studio will need (and probably already have). Ergo: Mac Pro.

The iMac solution will still only be viable for small to mid-sized studios that can get away with 'software' solutions for their audio recording needs. It's horses for courses.

I only run a small studio set-up (enough for a dozen tracks of audio and a lot of midis), so it's easy to gradually economise on the hardware as processing power increases and software improves. My current iMac 24" Intel serves me well, though there are always toys I would love to have.

The i7 is attractive for the potential it offers in the performance boost it will offer my software, both now but, more significantly, later as developers start to take advantage of the underlying architecture of the new chip (hyperthreading) and in Snow Leopard.

The i7 looks great (and it will handle my needs at a reasonable cost), but the Mac Pro is THE BEAST! If you wanna play big time, ya gotta go big time.

[rockitcity]

Thanks for all the responses.

Rockitcity, if I hook up my new drive which would come with Firewire 800 to the iMac, I would put my Traveler after that with a Firewire 800 to 400 cable? From what you posted, it sounds like my audio files would take advantage of the Firewire 800 bus speed. It doesn't matter having the audio interface after that? Also, what difference would a 16 or 32 mb cache mean to recording, playback, etc.?

Thanks again in advance.

Paul

Hi Paul,

Yes that will work. I had mine hooked up that way on my 24" intel imac, and had several other drives daisy chained as well. (I say "had" because I had a drive failure that apparently took out my FW 800 capability so now only FW 400 works...) Can't say what the cache differnce would be. Probably negligible unless you are recording a lot of tracks at once. For systems that have both FW 400 and 800 ports, the minute you plug anything into the FW 400 port on the computer, the whole bus speed drops to 400, regardless of what you have plugged into the FW 800 port. You can verify this with the System Profiler.

Bob

[tonester]

So which iMac is better for DP7 and VI's, the Dual Core 3.06, or the Quad Core 2.66? I may just upgrade my 20" iMac.......