Apple's G5 vs. PC audio comparison: a joke?, Apple Options

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Apple's G5 vs. PC audio comparison: a joke?

[macyu]

Ok, so no offense, but some of the posts here don't seem to help the topic so I'll pitch in. As a reminder, I have been using macs for all my life so I will be biased, but I am also a computer science person and have used, built and fixed windows as well as linux machines. Enough introduction.

So, why do I keep on choosing the Mac? Here are some observations:

For example, I use a Powerbook, and I have many friends with Dell Inspirons, IBM Thinkpads, Sony VAIO's and an NEC something. Anyways, all of them have audio line-ins, but the only one usable for recording anything musical is the Powerbook. The reason is quite simple. I'm used to doing lots of demo recordings just through the onboard line-input, and I could monitor through software with satisfactory latency. Somewhere in the 10 miliseconds range at 512k buffer size. Try that on the forementioned wintel laptops and you'll find out that it's impossible to get below something ridiculous like 1500k buffer, and like a 1 second delay. Happens to be that their onboard audio is usually the Intel chipset combo or a SoundMAX board that were more or less designed to be 'extras'. Ofcourse, we can all say that to do anything serious, you need an external audio interface, but hey, it does speak about the quality and consideration put into the hardware design. Besides, it's handy to have this extra input that is actually usable.

Moving on, of course you find that Windows have the higher clock speeds and the generally better looking specs. Ofcourse, my powerbook is shadowed by my friend's 3.2 ghz Pentium 4 tower with a gig of RAM, Radeon 9800 pro, Soundblaster audigy 2 pro etc. Whatever, he likes his as the entertainment machine but he has fiddled with music from time to time. I once had this piano sample that was a gigabyte in size. My powerbook with 512 struggled a lot with it, but played it, his computer barely played it even with double the memory. But the problem is not only that. He got all his computer parts for this home theater thing, but once he got the surround speakers and everything hooked up, the dvd's don't produce any sound. Turns out that Media Player doesn't recognize the soundcard without some really specific configuration (which I had to help) to pass on the correct channels, and even then it only worked for AC3 Surround. No DTS even though both his audiocard and his videocard claims decoding of them. By the way, the dvd player program that came with his videocard only wants to do 2 channels even though the system is set up for surround.

Well, enough ranting for tonight. I'm sorry if this bored you or you didn't find it helpful at all. I thought I'd share a case by case example. Oh and P.S. we don't get attacked by being on the internet. Buy a PC if you like being tech support. If you really like tinkering, get Linux and you can even write your own version of programs!