I'm not an audio engineer but I do know I have seen MacPros hooked up
to some impressive studio settings and they are commonly used in
professional motion picture and audio production settings. They are
generally connected to these systems using the Optical digital audio
input and output Toslink ports on the MacPros.
I have a catalog of this king of stuff from BH Photo www.bhphoto.com
in New York City. looking at the website I noticed a number of
devices with as many as 26 inputs for less than $400 that worked via
FireWire.
I'll be the first to admit however that I understand little of this
Greg
On Feb 27, 2007, at 01:11 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
Hi Greg,
Greg Kearney wrote:
On Feb 26, 2007, at 16:19 , Veli-Pekka Tätilä wrote:
Simply put, can I use normal PCI cards, not PCI Express cards, with
any of the current and future Intel Macs on offer?
I've got two PCI cards I wouldn't want to part with, no matter
whether my next OS will be Windows Vista, some flavor of Linux or
OS X. One is my 10 in 10 out soundcard, the TerraTec EWS88 MT.
Modern Macs have very complete sound support so you will not need a
sound card.
Hmm I'm sceptical about that. My PCI card can do 24 bit and 96 kHz
with actually decent quality and has good DAcs in it. ANother thing
it has is 5 stereo pairs for input and output which show up as five
different sound cards, at least in Windows. No internal MAc card is
going to compete with that. The other thing is, once again,
latency. CAn the internal MAc sound card use soft synths at a
latency that's comparable to good ASIO audio cards on the PC stuff
like 5 ms?
The other PCI card is the HardSoftware HardSID, which is basically
the C64 SID chip on a PCI card. I think they have OS X drivers so I
could at least play SID files with the card and use it in
emulators <snip>
, although the MIDI environment in it is Windows-only.
I was able to find a program call SIDPLAY for Mac that is voiceover
compatible.
Yes, but that's software emulation. I have the real hardware on the
card and it sounds quite different. Granted I don't listen to SID
music all they, but would still like to be able to use the hardware
I've purchased over the years.
Thanks for your help, though.
I still don't see how Apple has ditched PCI cards so quickly. I
mean that would be almost like saying: we don't support CDs any
more as by now all people will store their data on DVDs in stead,
as it is more modern. I mean there are heaps of PCI devices
produced in the last five years, for example. I've yet to hear
about any PCI express sound cards, too, though Firewire and USB are
getting more common.
Another analogy is the lack of a floppy drive. I recall when that
Mac friend of mine used to suffer from the lack of floppy support
for data transfer. ALthough I feel like I can say good bye to
floppies now, it took me about five years to reach that status.
ONly when USb mmemory sticks were mainstream and I had no need to
boot to DOS to format my hard drives, could I really get rid of
floppies on the PC. Mind you this is just an analogy, though, and
not a very good one at that, either, <grinb>.
--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/
