Best Audio I/o For Mac G5 Options

[cyanbaby101]

I am building a new studio funded by my company so money is no obeject.

1) What is the best, top of the line, AD/DA converter and Audio I/O that is compatible with MAC G5 Panther.

2) If I am suping up my MAC with 8GB of RAM is it still necessary to buy additional DSP Cards for my VST processing? Ifo so, what is the difference between the two?

Thanks in advance.

[jeffca]

Since you asked, check out the Prism Sound ADA-8XR. It is the ultimate hook up. It also costs about $9,000. If that's too much, any of the stuff by Apogee Digital kicks ass. If that's still too pricey, check out MOTU's stuff.

All of the stuff I mentioned is THE stuff to have at their price points, but what you need for your studio and the type of music you're producing will dictate how important and feature rich your I/O has to be.

To future proof your purchase, you'll probably want to stay with Firewire as opposed to a PCI card solution. I have a MOTU 2408/308 rig hooked to my G5. When I bought it, Firewire was in its infancy and there were no I/O's available. As it stands, though, I'd still need this system so that I could connect all of my digital effects to my DAW.

Let me offer one bit of specific advice since I'm already in the boat you're boarding: load your G5 with an extra 2gb of RAM and spend the money you'd have spent on the rest of the RAM on a Powercore or UAD-1, some plug ins (the Sony Oxford plugs are fantastic) and a fast Firewire drive such as a Medea G-Raid.

Even now, most apps can't access more than 2 gigs of RAM. While this may not be the case with Logic, you'd have to be running ridiculously large samples in an absurd number of soft synths to run a G5 out of steam that has 2.5gb of memory. Considering Logic's powerful Freeze function, you'd be seeing little or no benefit from the extra RAM.

I would seriously suggest a G-Raid as your project drive. It has G5 cosmetics and Medea is a real player in AV storage solutions. While a second S-ATA drive in the G5 will be good as extra storage and on-line back up, drives get unbelievably hot in that cramped drive bay. Both the OEM and the second Hitachi drives that I have in my G5 fried in less than 6 months when I was running audio projects on the internals. Ever since I got the array, everything is running smooth.

That's my 2 cents.
Jeff

This post has been edited by jeffca: Tue 11 Jan 2005, 16:48