it's all about audio interface primarily,
it's a matter of drivers, actually only very few manufacturers make very good drivers, RME being one of few as far as I know,
another matter is connection interface, PCIexpress being best and Thunderbolt being second best, that said AMD will never support thunderbolt because it's Intel tech

 

My latency (better, roundtrip) needs in ms are exactly the time that the sound needs to travel from my piano strings to my ears when I press a key (let's say 1 m). I think that would be 3-4 ms (if we are talking headphones). 1st, am I right? 2nd can you get me that with 512 buffer - me think no way.. and it's sadly just the nr. I can get /w my shitty laptop ATM

and I don't want to quantize - rather practice some more and "da capo", or my "special groove" is lost

 

I was just reading CPU magazine which has several articles about Ryzen motherboards and Ryzen itself. They ran at 5GHz easily and without liquid cooling. The trick they said is to overclock just a little bit to get max performance out of all components especially the RAM, which has to be the right type. Not the fastest RAM but slightly slower. Check it out yourself.

 

i only record guitar and bass and i find 512 buffer confortable, i even use 640

 

totally forgot to mention drivers, thats pretty damn important. I use Lynx pcie and Motu Pcie. Used to use RME pcie as well, all have amazing drivers.

 

Apologies a bit out of topic - but as I am just gathering info for a new desktop.. as a piano man ~7ms would be heaven for my keyboard playing. But I don't hear my keyb. (like /w guitar, vocals) so at least this is a +.

My question is: do you have any special setup/technique to record guitar/bass. I have a buddy that comes to play guitar for me and he always complains about latency effect (if I put him direct in -> guitar plugs -> headphones) because he can hear the guitar itself (esp Gibson lp.. Fender one is quieter - forgive me, I know nothing about guitars). So he usually brings this fx box /w wah pedal that emulates amp/cab (you'll know) for the feel.. and I split the signal on mixer, recording only the dry to DAW and then apply sw fx..

 

Everything matters? Computers are systems, the sum of the parts. Disc drives aren't as exciting as CPUs.

The usual advice is - "Set a budget - buy the best you can for that dough."

I haven't had Intel for twenty years, because I'm a "bang-for bucks" guy, and usually AMD wins. [Intel surely wins on absolutes for just about everything else]. And AMD have had far better (longer lasting architecture) upgrade paths. Saves you money, but locks you in. I'm also content to be "behind the curve", because there's a heavy premium for cutting edge. [Escape the cult of the new and you can save a lot of money.]

And then there's multicore / parrallelisation. There are very good reasons why extra cores give diminishing returns.

Plus, Ryzen is new. In and of itself, that is a *bad* thing.

I'd say the recommendation would still be Intel, with the emphasis on clock (and system) speed, not number of cores. OTOH, whatever one buys after a little due diligence will likely be a pretty fantastic machine.

Besides, if folks can't manage with today's PCs, they are surely doing something wrong. There is always a workaround to reduce CPU demand.

 

I gotta say this:

"upgrade path" is nonsense, it's more effective to sell everything and buy another "from scratch", money is saved if you don't waste money for headroom you may not even make use of afterall, that said it's always better to save little more money and buy "everything" simultaneously, plus the fact in professional environment any changes/upgrades to whatever reliable config are tricky (may explain why many studios rather stick to old protools and old macs for ex.)

multicore performance is still a lottery, extra cores are handy, but IPC (instructions per clock) and cpu frequency (core clocks) are what matters always, therefore I would still rather get overclockable i5 instead of locked 6-core Xeon and in most cases the i5 would outperform for lower price,

about Ryzen, I gotta agree that any new tech is a "bet on unknown" and in professional use it's a no-brainer to put focus on reliability and having the latest generation is NOT what I'd recommend,

last but not least, DAW choice matters as well, because it indirectly affects resource usage efficiency and so some DAWs are more tailored towards recording, some towards virtual instruments, some towards live performance - it's worth researching which one is most suitable for what is needed, for me it's Reaper for ex.

 

Interesting Videos. Not because of the Intel vs AMD aspect, but because of the sheer amount of plugins that can run with this beasts. I bought a new Board and i7 6700k last week and expecting my case and RAM any minute now to start my new Hackintosh build. Getting excited. The main reason I didn't invest in Ryzen is because is just too new to use it in a Hackintosh territory. I'm an advanced user but I nowhere would consider myself somebody who could do some ground work to solve installtion issues with it. All in all I think it's a good thing for customers that AMD is back to keep Intel on their toes and vice versa in terms of innovation and CPU prices.

 

Being a pianist, guitarist, songwriter and arranger who also records vocals daily... 512 samples is tolerable, 256 is okay, usually I go for 64... or since I have an interface with DSP mixer, I just record at 1024 samples while listening direct

 

Wow, I could never play with that amount of latency. More power to you!

 

i think that It's a matter of hearing, i mean, i only hear the sound of the processed guitar not the picking (my right hand picking), and my brain automatically sychronize the sound as if i have no latency, or maybe it's the asio4all that when you record it does it with no latency, It's very important the metronome if you practice without a metronome you will suffer at recording your music

 

and i record with a dual core cpu intel CELERON hehe i'am a god.

 

Neither do I

 

Audio is a pretty boring subject to a CPU which can operate at a rate of round about 4.000.000.000 Cyles per second. With the right interface, fast enough Hard Disk you could record audio tracks with an Intel Pentium 2 from 1999. Maybe not 24 Tracks at once. But a few at least.

But Digital Signal Processing by using Virtual Instruments or effect plugins is not. That's where you need all the juice. But not so much for recording which is basically just writing data to storage and playing it back.

 

yes its way better for low latency then Ryzen, if you go for overclocking both you nearly double the performance

 

where ??
they cant even overclock to 4 Ghz stable without lc

 

intel I7 is your only smart option

 

I need to monitor directly lots of times, micing my amp and not use software (like Amplitube and such for example) if there is lots going on, lots of effects in my guitar chain or vsti that are crunching numbers on other tracks that have not been "frozen" (I use FL Studio, hence the quotation marks). I am not comfortable with more than about 6ms. Anything greater than that and I feel that I am way ahead of what is coming through the monitors or headphones. What about you mrfloyd?

 

hey brother!

what kind of amp and stuff do you have? ( im an amp lover) im getting ready to build a
5F8-A hand wired, from scratch with a power scaling feature( a dial that allows you to go from 100 watts to 1 watt anywhere in between and the 6l6gc are the amp distortion able to adjust at any volume, if you dial the full 100 watss it be like a blackface clarity as you go down a bit you start getting the breakup from powertubes and rectifier sponginess and then im going to make it dual rectifier so you can switch from solid state or tube rectifiers) .I am basing the design on the 1958 fender twin tweed design then adding the extra features. I got 2 x celestion alnico cream speakers and already made the 2x12.
here is the kit
http://www.tubeampdoctor.com/en/shop_TAD_Amp_Kits_AMP_Kits_TWEED/Tweed_Two_Twelve_65_5F8A_Style_3361

 

Last edited: Jul 14, 2017