Yay for cheap computers

digitalscreamdigitalscream Frets: 26451
edited November 2013 in Studio & Recording
My main recording machine is a self-built quad core 2.4GHz machine, 6GB RAM, SSD, big hard drive etc. However, I'm getting pretty damn tired of breaking it all down, lugging it to our rehearsal studio etc, so I figured I'd get a cheap laptop for recording with the band. The idea was to render the guide track at home with various parts missing and then record the stems as necessary and reassemble on the main recording rig - I figured that there was no way a poxy little laptop would be able to handle 70+ tracks with all the EQ, reverbs etc running. While maintaining reasonable latency (the desktop runs at about 14/15ms).

Oh, how wrong I was.

Enter my eBay-special Toshiba M10 - 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB disk running Vista 32-bit. With the same TC Impact Twin interface, it actually manages slightly lower latency (12/13ms) while recording 4 simultaneous tracks against 70+ with effects, at about 40 - 45% CPU.

All for the princely sum of £120. 

Fucking awesome. It's even got a good 2 hours of battery life.
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  • digitalscreamdigitalscream Frets: 26451
    edited November 2013
    Also, in other news, Reaper is officially awesome. Until now I hadn't tried the remote processing feature, which is basically the ability to run a slave copy of Reaper on another machine which just handles effect processing. I fired up both copies, switched about three quarters of the effects over to remote mode and instantly the CPU usage on the laptop dropped from 45% to about 15% as the desktop took on the load. Network usage stood at about 12Mbps - you definitely need a gigabit network.

    Question - can you even do this with other DAWs? Pretty sure you can't with Logic or Cubase...not sure about Pro Tools (although it strikes me as the sort of thing Avid would discourage, because they'd rather you remortgaged your house to buy their external DSP units).
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  • Interesting. I haven't been using my main interface with the laptop due to no FireWire port but if I'm not mistaken the interface you are using us FireWire? At that price might be worth investing in a dedicated chesty recording laptop
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  • digitalscreamdigitalscream Frets: 26451
    edited November 2013
    Yes - that's the main reason I chose the M10. It seems to have a pretty decent Firewire chipset, which is lucky (you never know whether it's going to have compatibility issues, since FW seems to be a bit of an afterthought on laptops).

    Another machine which is in the same ballpark of performance as the M10 is the HP 6930p - you can usually find them on eBay in the £100 - £130 range, too.

    The only slight annoyance with the M10 is that it's a bit of a brick of a machine (the photos are a bit misleading), but in the grand scheme of things it's pretty irrelevant.

    The other great thing with both laptops is that they come in a variant with 1440x900 resolution, rather than the less-good 1280x800 and totally useless 1366x768.
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  • Also, in other news, Reaper is officially awesome. Until now I hadn't tried the remote processing feature, which is basically the ability to run a slave copy of Reaper on another machine which just handles effect processing. I fired up both copies, switched about three quarters of the effects over to remote mode and instantly the CPU usage on the laptop dropped from 45% to about 15% as the desktop took on the load. Network usage stood at about 12Mbps - you definitely need a gigabit network.

    Question - can you even do this with other DAWs? Pretty sure you can't with Logic or Cubase...not sure about Pro Tools (although it strikes me as the sort of thing Avid would discourage, because they'd rather you remortgaged your house to buy their external DSP units).

    You used to be able to do this with Logic Nodes but I don't think it exists in Logic X.  

    For general audio recording and light use of effects you don't need to spend a lot on computing these days.  The biggest issue on that laptop is the ram - 2gb really is not much if you ever want to include virtual instruments.
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  • John_PJohn_P Frets: 2744
    Thanks DS - I could do with a cheap laptop for work (the ones they supply are very old and battered and are blocked from installing even a printer.

    Now I'm seeing lots of bargains on ebay that will do the job - I hadn't realised how cheap a two or three year old laptop would be :)

    Quick questions for the techies - to run win7 for office and internet browsing, I figure a core2duo with 2G or more of ram would be fine? or should I go for at least an i3 to avoid shouting at it?
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  • You used to be able to do this with Logic Nodes but I don't think it exists in Logic X.  

    For general audio recording and light use of effects you don't need to spend a lot on computing these days.  The biggest issue on that laptop is the ram - 2gb really is not much if you ever want to include virtual instruments.
    Yeah, I don't use virtual instruments at all - our drummer records his parts with MIDI but gives me the WAV stems. For me, VSTs are pretty much limited to EQ, compression, delay and reverb (with the odd bit of pitch correction).

    RAM isn't actually much of an issue. Running the aforementioned track, I still had almost 1GB free. Reaper is very well-behaved with memory :)

    John_P said:
    Thanks DS - I could do with a cheap laptop for work (the ones they supply are very old and battered and are blocked from installing even a printer.

    Now I'm seeing lots of bargains on ebay that will do the job - I hadn't realised how cheap a two or three year old laptop would be :)

    Quick questions for the techies - to run win7 for office and internet browsing, I figure a core2duo with 2G or more of ram would be fine? or should I go for at least an i3 to avoid shouting at it?
    Yeah, a fast C2D (2.4GHz upwards) will easily be enough. That's nice, because an i3 laptop will set you back twice as much as the M10 or 6930p.

    I should mention...they're both 14" laptops, too.
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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073
    Ok...so I got myself a HP 6930p....which is quite cool, however...the firewire lead I have has a 9 pin one end which is fine for my Presonus mixer, but a 4 pin MALE on the other  which doesnt seem to fit in the HP slot.

    I cant seem to find a suitable cable....any ideas?
     


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  • spark240 said:
    Ok...so I got myself a HP 6930p....which is quite cool, however...the firewire lead I have has a 9 pin one end which is fine for my Presonus mixer, but a 4 pin MALE on the other  which doesnt seem to fit in the HP slot.

    I cant seem to find a suitable cable....any ideas?
     
    Is it roughly the same shape? I've often found that the connections are quite tight; it feels like it's not going to fit, but it does with the application of some (careful) force.
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  • John_PJohn_P Frets: 2744

    John_P said:
    Thanks DS - I could do with a cheap laptop for work (the ones they supply are very old and battered and are blocked from installing even a printer.

    Now I'm seeing lots of bargains on ebay that will do the job - I hadn't realised how cheap a two or three year old laptop would be :)

    Quick questions for the techies - to run win7 for office and internet browsing, I figure a core2duo with 2G or more of ram would be fine? or should I go for at least an i3 to avoid shouting at it?
    Yeah, a fast C2D (2.4GHz upwards) will easily be enough. That's nice, because an i3 laptop will set you back twice as much as the M10 or 6930p.

    I should mention...they're both 14" laptops, too.

    I just grabbed a dell - 3G of ram and C2D running at 2GHz for £56   I know it's not very wizzy but for work it should do nicely - I'm amazed how quickly prices drop for very usuable machines.   That's like buying a les paul standard and selling it 4 years later for less than a squier affinity!
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  • John_P said:
    I just grabbed a dell - 3G of ram and C2D running at 2GHz for £56   I know it's not very wizzy but for work it should do nicely - I'm amazed how quickly prices drop for very usuable machines.   That's like buying a les paul standard and selling it 4 years later for less than a squier affinity!
    This is it - everybody's obsessed with having the latest i3/i5/i7 processors and totally forgets that the older CPUs are perfectly usable. In fact, older machines can often be
    better than the new ones, particularly when it comes to screen resolution. 1440x900 is infinitely more usable than 1366x768, for example, but you find those machines going for bugger-all (relatively speaking).
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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073
    spark240 said:
    Ok...so I got myself a HP 6930p....which is quite cool, however...the firewire lead I have has a 9 pin one end which is fine for my Presonus mixer, but a 4 pin MALE on the other  which doesnt seem to fit in the HP slot.

    I cant seem to find a suitable cable....any ideas?
     
    Is it roughly the same shape? I've often found that the connections are quite tight; it feels like it's not going to fit, but it does with the application of some (careful) force.
    Ahhh....its fits !...cheers.


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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073
    so...now i have another problem, I loaded all my Presonus stuff on no problem , but now the laptop is not seeing the mixer, I suspsect the firewire chipset as its not Texas Instruments, its some Ricoh type.

    Any idea if this can be replaced?

    I have the HP6930p, thanks


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  • spark240 said:
    so...now i have another problem, I loaded all my Presonus stuff on no problem , but now the laptop is not seeing the mixer, I suspsect the firewire chipset as its not Texas Instruments, its some Ricoh type.

    Any idea if this can be replaced?

    I have the HP6930p, thanks
    #1 - You can't replace the onboard FW chips in laptops
    #2 - The symptoms you describe are not the problem that Presonus describe; if it was a chipset problem, then you'd get dropped packets resulting in audio oddities.

    I'd suspect you have a more fundamental problem here. Are you sure you have the correct drivers installed for your Firewire port? Could also be a dodgy cable.
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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073

    Thanks, well Im no expert but , I tried updating the firewire driver and it said it was the current driver.

    Dodgy cable? well it was cheap but it has been working fine with my old vaio desktop.

    Message reads..Firestudio device has not initilaized, please check hardware config.

     



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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073
    All sorted..still a bit iffy but generally ok.

    HP runs Studio One fine...just need to get the docking station to have 2 monitors.  


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  • spark240 said:
    All sorted..still a bit iffy but generally ok.

    HP runs Studio One fine...just need to get the docking station to have 2 monitors.  
    Out of curiosity, what did you do to fix it?
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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073

    Well....you know...I dont know !

    It seems to be more about the sequence of power up..even then it can still come up with a message saying "not initialized" but if you try again it works.

    In general its quite stable...no crashes once it running so considering I was going to spend 1K on a new PC, my £175 laptop was a good buy.

     



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  • spark240 said:

    Well....you know...I dont know !

    It seems to be more about the sequence of power up..even then it can still come up with a message saying "not initialized" but if you try again it works.

    In general its quite stable...no crashes once it running so considering I was going to spend 1K on a new PC, my £175 laptop was a good buy.

     

    Well, that's a relief. All things considered though, for anyone reading this and thinking "maybe...?", the Toshiba M10 might be a better bet. I've had absolutely no trouble with mine using the Firewire port and the TC Impact Twin. I've since upgraded it with a 120GB SSD and an extra 2GB RAM (just in case), and it's pretty much golden. In fact, I've retired the quad core desktop I was using as my studio machine now. It only comes out when I need to do some video rendering (Vegas can use the beefier graphics card for rendering).
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  • spark240spark240 Frets: 2073
    mm...I still might change to the Toshiba at some point...does it support dual monitors?


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  • It supports an extra monitor out (ie desktop spread across an external monitor and the laptop display). Is that what you meant?
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