I certainly hope not. I just ordered a 1.6 GHz P4 machine to take over for my old PIII 450 which just couldn't handle the load. Actually P4's have a lot of instructions just for audio processing (format converting, streaming, compressions & decompression)... Audio is tied a lot to the processor, but you'd be surprised at what a fast ATA/100 HDD will do for editing (look at the Western Digital Caviar special editions [8 mb of Cache, compared to 2 mb for everyone else and it's meant for A/V uses in the first place), and a good chunk of fast ram. Remember, in PIII no matter how fast you get you're still going to be limited to 133 Mhz ram (or mostly 100 Mhz for mid-level machines), with the P4 you'll have 266 Mhz DDR or 400 Mhz RDRAM (rambus)...