Rain Audio PC's

[spark240]

Anyone used them?

I have decided that my old Sony Vaio isn't up to my requirements anymore so need a decent PC with Sonar X1 / X2 producer, I have spoken to Rain a while back and they seem to offer a good package.

Any views?

[tehLORD]

Look at Scan as well, they're well respected among my peers (3 of which bought from them).

Depends what you want to use it for really, a specced up machine may well be overkill if you just want to track 20-30 channels of audio.

[spark240]

Ok Thanks, I dont need anything too high end, only doing home recording stuff.

[tehLORD]

Thought about a self build? You'd easily be able to do something for around the £500-700 mark that'd last you for donkeys.

[spark240]

Not really, I mean....im no idiot , but i dont have the inclination or time really, so I would prefer to get it from someone who knows what they are doing, ........

[tehLORD]

Well the basic Scan systems are around £1000-1100 and even those are considerably more powerful than the machine I use now, which is capable of handling projects with up to about 100 busy channels, but I also notice Rain has than Nimbus Z system at around the same money (assuming you spec it up to an i7 CPU). It might be worth going for an i7 as you can utilise hyperthreading, which a couple of the newer plugins I use (Diva for example) benefit from greatly. If you're only tracking and mixing with a couple of plugins there's probably no need. If it's all audio you use, memory is more important, and 16GB would be complete overkill, but still relatively cheap.

[spark240]

Thanks,

My pal is running Pro tools lite on an i5 with 8G ram, but I did notice he had some latency and more importantly some processor hungry plug ins didnt run well.

[tehLORD]

Thanks,

My pal is running Pro tools lite on an i5 with 8G ram, but I did notice he had some latency and more importantly some processor hungry plug ins didnt run well.

Well if you run Diva in divine mode then even the most powerful i7 machine will still run only a couple of instances on comples patches. I don't see how an i5 would run into issues under normal use though. Perhaps he's not running his audio interface buffer size with a sensible setting or he's using some look ahead mastering plugins as inserts, or maybe even a load of reverbs on insterts? All those combinations will cause issues on any machine.

[Mr_Brightside]

Hi guys

I've just put together an i5 processor with 16gb of ram (complete overkill as mentioned but its soooo cheap) on a PC running Windows 7 and Cubase 6. Currently recording a project with 30 tracks of audio and and about 10 virtual instruments and I'm hardly taxing my PC. The only issue I had was 32 bit plugins running in 64 bit mode but I used jbridge to sort that.

Well worth looking at the self build option as you can make a monster of a PC for home recording for very little money.

Cheers

Paul

[spark240]

Thanks for the replies and advice...the only issue I have with self build is I just dont know enough about it to confidently buy all the bits and get it going.

I dont mind getting buying all the kit...but I woud be much happier for someone else to build it.