don’t waste all that lovely cash on a MAC !! :O

Get windows 7 it rocks.

I use OSX, xp, windows 7 and a few releases of linux and windows 7 is the most stable.

if ur making music… go for a mac i recon? i mean tell me if im wrong but i think thats kinda what they are for!! plus…. actually no plus….. oh wait actually…. plus macs look the nuts.

get the mac, pc’s are nothing but a pain in the ar**

@vincentx90 350639 wrote:

get the mac, pc’s are nothing but a pain in the ar**

as I mentioned before I fix macs and PCs and macs are getting less reliable while pcs are getting more.

The more macs become compatable with everything the more of a pain in the arse they become.

OSX appears to be a linux knock-off with a pretty face.

It looks like an update of 1990s Sun or SGI box and is powerful but like most Unix based systems they are rock solid if used properly and left alone if working but you can hose up stuff really badly if you don’t know what you are doing..

Macs are very much like the custom audio/video kit I worked on in the 1990s during my time as an engineer in the TV industry.

Bear in mind in studios they have techies to fix the stuff when the creatives find it has gone tits up and because of the loss of revenue involved with downtime the techies are expected to work fast. Many home users don’t always have this luxury

both platforms can be flaky if you get the wrong combination of software and hardware… I’ve only just now managed to get a reliable PC video editing platform – it doesn’t look pretty (its based around a 3 year old laptop and the second monitor is CRT based!) but it works..

hardware failures are rare with stand alone computers but with multimedia there is always risks of static, power surges, rising ground voltages on the mains, how many people have their project studio’s mains wiring checked out before they build it?

surge protectors are good – I have them on all the kit at work as we are out in the sticks. I also use a UPS for the telephone system and it is linked up to the linux core server so I get graphs of the power. the mains electricity from EDF can be very ropey in some areas…

@Iacchus 350713 wrote:

the overall operating system may be getting more stable but when half of the music software you want to use doesnt even load on anything beyond XP then what’s the point?

maybe the plugins will release special windows 7 versions.. cant be arsed to hang around and find out

vista is a fucking nightmare. I only grudgingly have it on some of the office PC’s (as Dell give it away) and will be glad to see the back of it. When you support 20+ PC’s and mobile devices across five sites flaky kit is the last thing you want – I even turned down a brand new vista machine for my own desktop and let a colleague have it instead (it won’t run the finance database for instance without a lot of tweaking)

@Iacchus 350736 wrote:

interestingly roland themselves have failed to clone the 303.. they rebuilt the circuits in models such as the MC-303 and MC-909 but the sound was too pure and clean. Design flaws in the original gave it that dirty scratchy sound that nobody has ever quite hit on again.

it would probably be stuff like the use of cheaper 2SA-2SC series of transistors in the circuitry with more random noise (due to impurities in the semiconductors) as well as other components presumably no longer made or made to much higher tolerances these days..

@Iacchus 350741 wrote:

how do you know everything? *squints at you suspiciously*

you seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of most subjects discussed on this forum 😉

I don’t know everything but I started getting interested in technology when my age was in single figures, grew up in the days when analogue audio kit was still common and worked in the TV/brodcast industry in the late 90s during the analogue/digital crossover 😉

in the 1980s there was a time when if you wanted some gadgets you had to build them…

I wholeheartedly agree with those who still prefer analogue kit (for both recording and creating music) but sadly the recording/delivery methods of today put in so much compression any subtle differences are lost..