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Matched Pairs of Microphones

We always say that you should consult with us before you buy a computer system with intentions of making music. Nothing is more frustrating than spending tons of time and money to get a computer only to find out the musical part of what you want to do with it isn’t going to work. Our technical support staff reports that this problem is quite common with PC users due to the open architecture of the platform and have offered a few basic points to be aware of. These are not a substitute for speaking with us, but may give you some insight into what a few of the issues are. Like most rules these can sometimes be broken, but you have to know what you are doing or get more specific advice from us. Aside from maybe spending a little more money you will not go wrong by following these guidelines.

1) Be careful of Big Brand Name Consumer systems. Turnkey systems from big electronic chains are often problems. The reason for this is that most of these systems are only designed to handle consumer hardware on their motherboards so there are usually lots of installation problems or just flat out incompatibility issues.

2) Stay away from non-Intel motherboards and processors. There are tons of vendors who have incompatibility issues with these chipsets. The performance benchmarks that show they are as fast or faster than Intel often don’t apply to musical issues, and the problems are way deeper than speed.

3) Before purchasing any system start with the software that you will be performing your recording with, because they will always have a listing of what hardware performs best with their system. They have tested those specific pieces for their performance and anything else is just a risk that you take…

As a (very) general rule an excellent PC for audio recording would be:

    – Pentium II or III 400mhz
    – 128 MB of ram
    – A full duplex sound card (Layla, Prodif96, Aark20/20, etc…). No on board sound cards of any kind. They are notorious for causing IRQ problems and eating up resources. If you want to do professional work stay away from consumer hardware.
    – A simple video card (not a bunch of sophisticated graphics, which will likely conflict with the system) and you should disable your modem (it usually causes conflicts).

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