ibook G4 or powerbook G4

is the audio card the same on the ibook as on the powerbook? i hear it's pretty nice... or so nowak sez anyway

 

I imagine its the same converter and amp business. It's pretty nice if you don't mind 16-bit sound... which I don't. Noiseless, not muddy, and all that at least. Very, very little difference compared to an Echo Indigo at 16/44100. You won't be able to run Reaktor at 96000 on the iBook anyway. It'll eat your CPU for lunch.

More than powerful enough to drive most phones too.

 

well, you are more than able to use all options given by reaktor on an iBook, but it really depends on how complex the ensemble is... As well as on your workflow.

 

its 512K SRAM on-chip L2 cache with the current ones.

 

Irony, right?

but here's something interesting:

According to Swedish Mac-site Macnytt.se. the latest update contained some hidden information:They went through one of the .kext files provided (AppleMacRISC4PE) and found 2 new product codes: PowerMac7,3 und PowerMac8,1.

Now, 7,2 is the current G5s (this, according to the Apple Museum http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=tam&page=products&subpage=newworld

so 7,3 could mean new Power-Macs, but 8,x seems to be an entirely new product.



We'll see…

 

Yeah I saw that. I make the daily trip to macrumors.com, so I have more than enough useless information. ;-) The fact is you never know until they release it. I hope they bring back the cube or something. It would be nice to have a small machine and a fold-up flatscreen monitor, just in case I needed to get to a gig or something. It would just be a matter of two small bags. Laptops are nice, but you sacrifice screen size (sometimes annoying) and power (perhaps more annoying). Not to mention upgradability, etc.

 

didn't get this from Macrumors myself.

Yes, something really powerful, small, robust, etc.

I wonder if Apple will eventually make use of SONY/IBM's Cell-Chip. Seems to be very powerful! Could very probably be meshed into a grid type mini supercomputer system. Why keep buying new hardware, when you could just be extending on an existing system.

 

how is the mac audio at 48khz? i ask because i am definitely thinking of getting one and it would be nice to be able to run out of the box at a respectable 48/16 as that's what i do now anyway. i need my treble, don't you know...

 

do you mean in terms of audio quality, or in terms of system performance with regard to Reaktor?

 

yes

 

G5 Power-Mac or G4 Powerbook?

 

to answer half of your question: audio quality is very good on a Mac, traditionally always has been. The new G5s offer Optical digital audio ins and outs, the latency is very good, some people initially complained a bit about the noise of the fans (I think there's 7 of them) but the current models have improved. Performance: you should really be able to run most ensembles at 48k on a G5. Audio quality depends on your choice of sound-card as well, of course.

I'm very happy with the audio quality of my somewhat arthritic machine (no it's not a G5). When I play around with convolution I tend to save my files in IRCAMS 32bit Floating Point audio format. Now, if you think 48k is sexy wait till you hear that!

 

Also it should be noted that audio is processed at 32-bit internally anyway, so outputting 24-bit or 32-bit audio isn't an additional cost to the CPU. If anything its less as there's no need to dither down to 16 at the end.

 

Dither is a Microsoft invention !

Down with dither! 32-bit all the way!

Hell, come to think of it: 64-bit all the way!

 

I was hoping you were going to address the issue of system performance on G4 systems.

 

Audio processing within Reaktor is done at 32-bit FP, as well, btw

To round things off: as mentioned before the final sound quality will largely depend on your choice of sound-card. RME Hammerfall's DIGIs seem to be pretty good, don't use the older versions (pre 2003) of these, though. NOT compatible with G5s.

Make up your own mind.