building home studio/seeking advice on pc

[esmith]

I have a Roland SI-24 Studio Package Pro and will be using Logic and Sibelius to start with.

My computer whiz brother and I are building a pc to be a designated audio machine. This is what we came up with on my budget:

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.8C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache, Hyper Threading Technology

2 Seagate 120GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives,

Memory _OCZ Enhanced Latency Series Platinum Edition 184 Pin 1GB(512MBx2) DDR PC-3200 ,

ASUS 875P Chipset Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU, Model "P4C800-E DELUXE",

Antec 550 Watt Power Supply With 2 Fans 5.25 Control Panel, Model "TRUE CONTROL 550W",

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy2 ZS Platinum Pro PCI Sound Card, Model "SB0360" ,

I will also run two monitors.

I am confused on the set up of of both studio monitors and surround speakers (I will mix occasionally in surround).

I have Fostex PM1 monitors, but don't know if I need to connect them through the soundcard or through the SI-24 . . I am a musician by trade, but need to produce and record my own work in the area I now live.
Any other suggestions would be apprectiated.

Thanks for your help

[ February 21, 2004, 08:31 PM: Message edited by: esmith ]

 

[jscott]

Well. I have two comments:

• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Te 550W supply is probably overkill, a decent TruePower 330 is very adequate for your configuration, but more is not a bad thing. If you were using a NForce chipset, then myh response would be different.
• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The use of SATA drives has been blown way out of proportion. Now mind you, these comments come form much experience of building some 60+ PC's. I recently switched to SATA drives in a few higher end computers, where disc perfomance is meaningful. The SATA drives perform more sluggishly than do PATA drives. No doubt, the connections to SATA drives and the hype about them is sexy, but the realities are far different, right now anyway. On doing some research on this, I found a very good explanation for this and rather than trying to spit it back out, [="http://ata-atapi.com/sata.htm"]heres the link[/]. I have found all these facts to be true. By the way, I also use the ASUS board, as well as many others, performance does get better when reverting back to PATA drives. Mind you these performance hits do not show up on a newley installed and formatted drive, but even despite the best defrag programs and maintenance/configs, they do show up as the drive gets further populated. Whether you see and feel a difference will depend upon your amount of use.

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[esmith]

Thanks for the feedback!!

Any comment on how to hook up my powered monitors for best results when mixing. Do I run them through the mixing console, or the sound card.

Thanks again,

esmith

 

[dabmeister music]

IMO, I'd do away with the SB Audigy sound card. Other than that, everything else is cool. This is a consumer based card that won't do what a lot of other (Prosumer/Pro) cards are capable of doing. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is OK but you can do better with what's currently on the market. I'd go for a sound card dedicated to "multitrack" recording. Good luck