there is no comparison between the three pre's you listed...the avalonM5 wins hands down.

doulos21
If RM says the Avalon is best, then I would go with that. He is in the "trenches" everyday doing this stuff and has a lot of exposure to it.

My DAW is a Asus A7M266-D board, Dual Anthlon 1800+ with a gig of sdram and 2 Western Digital 80 hard drives. I am using Frontier Montana soundcard with Alesis AI3 converters for 18 ins and outs.

I don't currently have anything on the site to download that I recorded on this system other than the mic pre comparisons. I have one song I cut but I haven't posted it because it was written by another person and I haven't been able to secure a release to use it yet. Kurt

doulos21 ! If you are uppgrading now, stick with PC. If you can wait few months (4-6) then the Mac's are supposed to come up with powerful CPU. Sorry forgot the link to this story.

I would say don't wait on any computer purchase if you feel that's something you need to upgrade for your purposes. I say that COMPLETELY independent of any Mac vs. PC debate. If you have the mentality of waiting any amount of time for the "next big thing," then you'll always be disappointed and you'll never buy anything. Technology as of late changes way too fast to wait.

That's true, if you are running a business and competing with other studios for clients, you have to have the latest thing to impress them. With that in mind (and not to start a war here) I would go with PC uppgrading now, they simply pipe out more channels with more plugs.
I have a tendency to respond with the hobbyist in mind :roll:

only one problem with that were talkin digidesign wich dosent work well with pcs. What if i build my dream machine for the 001 and come to find out it wont fit the specks for the 002r? wich has happenend to me in the past from 001 to a 001 to run xp i had to upgrade and it runs slow. I get 5 stero plug ins at one time 5!!!!! before i switched to xp i was getting some 20 stero plugins. i cant see shellin out 1200 on a guessing game with digidesign so im gonna wait and buy my dm24 first.

You can, in fact build a Pc within the Digi guidelines and they have built the so called DaveC test and the last testing done between Mac and Pc was 18'th of march: Pc got 55 channels
Mac got 29 --//--
And the reason is bandwidth Pc 2,7gb (xp 2800+)
Mac 1,3gb (dual 1,25)

If a PC is built to the correct specs (ask Opus) it will run faster that the new Macs...
Originally posted by meeeee: :D

My DAW is an Asus A7M266-D board, Dual Anthlon 1800+ with a gig of sdram and 2 Western Digital 80 hard drives. I am using Frontier Montana soundcard with Alesis AI3 converters for 18 ins and outs.

On this computer I have run 24 tracks, with eq, comps, gates, efx, what ever I want at a 20% CPU load at 24 bit 44.1 sample rate ... Lots of CPU headroom left for even more. I actually don't ever see myself running out of headroom on this system and it sounds really good. no collapse of stereo image at the 2-bus. So it is possible on a PC. It just has to be configured correctly, with the correct mobo and no modem bs, My machine is dedicated to audio and audio only. If I was using it for gaming and Internet, word-processing etc.. I could see there being problems. But since I have dedicated it to audio only, I am sure it will be fine for what I need to do well into the future.
Kurt

Kurt, do you use any external hardware? I'm just curious how you deal w/ latency when using say, an external compressor or reverb. Or do you only use plugins?

-Jay

Jay,
I use outboard comps and pres (of course :D ) on the way in but once I am in the box, I only use the processors that came stock with Cubase SX 5.1. I have a rack of high end comps, a Manley El OP, Urei 1178 and LA4's and a Valley Dynamite. All I have been using recently has been the Manley or the Dynamite. I have discovered that the comps in Cubase are relatively transparent so if I add a bit more of them during the mix, the sound of the original vintage units still is prevalent.

As far a latency when tracking, I route the 2 mix and the track I am recording through a Mackie mixer for monitoring only (nothing that goes through the Mackie ever gets printed). All the pres I am currently using have multiple outs to accommodate this (one to the PC and one to monitor). I also have a bunch of outboard reverbs (11) but the only one I have been using recently is a Lexicon PCM 60, just for a bit of 'verb in the phones if needed while tracking. I never print this (although I could if I wanted) but rather just use it for monitoring.

When I am tracking multiple sources, Cubase has a function called "AISO monitor" that directly routes the output of a channel to the AI3 and then to the Mackie for latency free monitoring.
Kurt

golli that changes things thanks man! this so called test was not available when i was playing the guessing game with digidesign. :eek:

Dont mention it bro :)
Ps, the nVidia chipset is not supported by Digi, however that system is close to 32+18 or 32+20.

PPS, see ya in a week.