Here at Sony, we use Dell Dual Xeon 2.8 gHz boxes with Hyperthreading enabled. Very powerful, but stock boxed. Once you clean all the DELL installed stuff (basically a fresh start), these boxes rock.

Depending on the type of audio interface and the quality of the ASIO drivers, I can easily record 16 tracks of audio at 128 to 256 sample latency.

Downside of these boxes is the limited number of PCI 32 slots - 2. They have both PCI 32 and 64, but the PCI 64 slots (3) are not backward compatible with PCI 32 cards.

Peter

Hey Pipe,

My rambus machine is doing 24 tracks easy. Its a 2.0 single processor.

My AMD XP 1800 is doing 24 tracks easy. It too is a single processor machine.

My Opteron 244 dually is doing 24 easy.

I'm talking about cutting 24 tracks at a time.

I've also experimented cutting live tracks on a full band scenario. When I cut on this particular session, basic tracks were live and made up of:

* 8 mono tracks for drums
* 2 tracks bass
* stereo keys
* mono acoustic
* stereo electric
* stereo lead
* dummy vocal

18 total inputs used.

Back and forth for ODs on selected tracks, a couple of full band punches and 18 songs later. A total of 14 hours tracking all day long without any failures. Granted, this was all done on the opteron dually

.... but here's an interesting one:

Each setup is using 3 Delta 1010s...

Here's the Dually config:

550 watt ATX supply
Antec SOHO server tower
Boot to/Apps 15k SCSI (XP all latest updated and SP1)
Barracuda audio drives on primary master and slave
2 gigs of Corsair XMS matched & registered PC3200
TYAN Tiger K8W 8151 MB
2 x AMD OPTERON 244 64bit processors

The OPTERON is the fastest (by far) machine I've ever worked on. Transfer rate is 3.8 gBs per processor faster than a G5.

256 is VERY doable and acceptable, except for vocals, around here for some reason, that 6 ms will put the signal right back out of phase with the singer

interestingly, 12 ms wont bother them, and the cycle is right again.

I dont think those dell boxes will be a solution tho, I just dont see having enough I/O and 2 PCI slots wont cut it

tmr pro, you are doing this on that system with input monitoring on? What latency are you running?

I appreciate that this release of vegas 5 lays the groundwork for us hopefully either having hardware monitoring, or by that time PC's are insane fast

Agreed on the PCI issue. However, I tossed my old PCI expansion box at it and I now have 12 PCI slots - all populated. Of course this solution is dependent on how well the drivers are working.

Still, I have used multiple MOTU firewire or their proprietary "audiowire" solutions and can easily have all the i/o channels I need. (96 channels with the audiowire @ 96/24) The nice part of the Audiowire is that they have a really cool input monitoring console that gives you incredible routing flexability. With the mix and match nature of the audiowire boxes, you can get some very complete hardware i/o solutions.

Peter

In auto input with V5 there is 0 latency. You are no longer monitoring through the application when using auto input. It is monitoring the input of your sound card.

My cards are all set to their buffer default (512 MS).

The only time I bump my buffer down is when I'm using Sonar Producer>rewire>GigaStudio .... this is necessary because of the performance latency you'll experience when playing softsynth samples with a controller.... I can kick my buffers to their max allowable of 64ms and run 16 midi tracks up to 160 voices without a single hiccup.

>>>>>I dont think those dell boxes will be a solution tho, I just dont see having enough I/O and 2 PCI slots wont cut it<<<<<<

I wouldn't get out of my rambus machine thinking that I'll get better performance out of a bigger 800MhZ bussed P4 peon processor.

You will not see anywhere near the performance increase that you would expect.

The only way you'll see a vast improvement or performance that you have gotten use to using your rambus machine is by going in to an AMD 64 bit system.

this is just not true

Unless I am missing something BIG TIME

using the auto input in vegas, the signal goes thru a whole mix out the output buss and then to your soundcards

We had nice long discussions about the need for hardware monitoring, but that it wont be vegas 5

>>>>>>>>this is just not true

Unless I am missing something BIG TIME

using the auto input in vegas, the signal goes thru a whole mix out the output buss and then to your soundcards

We had nice long discussions about the need for hardware monitoring, but that it wont be vegas 5<<<<<<<<

Maybe my understanding of the application's routing is incorrect, pipe..... but my understanding of latency is not...

0 performance latency is what I am experiencing.... just like a tape machine.

I too like the MOTU audiowire monitoring. I recorded a 2 hour live concert, 17 tracks, flawlessly. One neat trick with the MOTU monitoring was that I was able to give the video guy a rough 8 channel mix which he then mixed, on the fly, to 2 channels with an outboard mixer.

I do find I can’t use the MOTU ASIO drivers for editing with Vegas 4 because after about 30% CPU usage the audio output switches on and off several times a second. Increasing the buffers helps till the CPU hits 40%. The CPU pigs are multiple copies of Ozone 3. The “legacy” drivers work fine. The CPU is a 2.5G Pentium.

Larry

I do find I can’t use the MOTU ASIO drivers for editing with Vegas 4 because after about 30% CPU usage the audio output switches on and off several times a second. Increasing the buffers helps till the CPU hits 40%. The CPU pigs are multiple copies of Ozone 3. The “legacy” drivers work fine. The CPU is a 2.5G Pentium.

Really? The Ozone plugs are rather expensive and also non-inplace, there by introducing even more latency overall. (They are not useable in an input monitoring because of their non-inplace implementation.)

Peter,

No detectable change with V5. This could be an MOTU or Ozone problem - not a Vegas problem. No crackles or pops BTW. Updated the MOTU drivers a month ago with no affect.

I'd be happy to supply any other information I can.

Thanks.

Larry

hopefully peter will step in on this but as far as I know there is no way youd be geting zero latency monitoring THRU vegas. Unless you are using your hardware's own monitoring, in which case you wouldnt be getting the auto input benefits