Emu Extreme Lead

[Berni]

Originally Posted by MBTC

Just some advice -- avoid laptops for a home studio unless you truly need the portability of it on a regular basis and are willing to pay the premium.

To get the most bang for your buck, you need a desktop-grade chip in a case with proper airflow and thermal handling. Anything less will always be faced with some combination of (a) not performing well enough (b) running hot (c) reduced life span becoming glitch over time as you said (d) high cost of replacement components (e) poor expandability. Maybe not all of those at one time, but they all greatly impact the viability of a laptop or slim profile case of any sort for a home studio.

You need a fast CPU to get the most out of modern soft synths, and fast CPUs require airflow that only desktop cases and cooling mechanisms can provide. Laptops are designed for portability and battery life optimization, not maximum performance.

Sure Mac Pros are nice but they are ridiculously priced. For about a grand you can get a PC that will deliver better performance than the most expensive Mac Pros. Remember Apple makes their money off of hardware -- to survive they have to find ways to keep you buying more of it.

OK enough of the apple bashing, get back behind your curtain. I personally need a laptop because like a lot of people I also use it for DJing/playing out but it is quite capable of running my studio as well. Sure they are expensive compared to a PC laptop but you get what you pay for. If I could afford both a studio computer & a gigging laptop then I would probably get one of the new iMacs for the studio.
Not wanting to start a platform flare but Apple do not just make there money from selling hardware. OSX & iOS are two of the biggest operating systems on the planet not to mention all the app's they produce.
Sure you can get a PC with better spec's for less money but it has to run on windows pretty much which I gave up on in 98 & nothing I've seen since has made me regret the decision. There is a reason why pretty much every DJ in the world uses the Macbook pro.
I did own an E-MU extreme lead several years ago but found the sounds quite dated even back then & being a ROMpler there's not much room for programming new sounds. It could be quite usefull if you are going for a retro kind of feel & for the money they are now there a pretty good deal.

[MBTC]

Originally Posted by Berni

OK enough of the apple bashing, get back behind your curtain. I personally need a laptop because like a lot of people I also use it for DJing/playing out but it is quite capable of running my studio as well.

Not Apple bashing - I have a Mac and I write software for Apple's devices. I don't use it for my primary studio machine because I need CPU power that requires a desktop case for cooling, and I don't want to spend $5k to get a Mac Pro that I would be happy with. No other Apple offering offers proper airflow and cooling.

Once again, *IF* you need portability (which you do if you're a DJ by profession, so my earlier message is not for you) then you pretty much have no choice but to have a laptop. Evilgus said his has gone tits up, which is what happens to laptops when you push them beyond their thermal boundaries for an extended period of time, which is why I made the recommendation.

My message was really more about laptop vs. desktop and generally about getting the most bang for the buck since he mentioned financial limitations. I can build a PC for a few hundred bucks that hangs with a Mac Pro costing several grand. Apple makes their money on hardware profit margins and that's just a fact of life. There are some things about the platform I like and things I don't. Bang for buck is not Apple's strong point. But if you have an Apple and like it, why change it? If it ain't broke, don't fix. But if it is broke, and it's Apple, it may be increasingly difficult to fix or upgrade yourself, because they go out of their way to keep their walled garden a secret.

Again it was a legitimate recommendation for one particular case. I don't recommend the exact same setup to everyone. If I were DJ'ing I would probably just go with a MacBook, because portability would be the main feature I need, and I probably would not be pushing the thermal limits with it running lots of CPU heavy synths live during a set. Samples and pre-mixed sets don't exactly require a horse of a computer to get the job done.

Also I don't think you want an iMac or any slim profile case -- not good enough airflow to be a good fit for a home setup, it will just always be running hot if you use a lot of soft synths, thus the life will be shortened and you'll have to drop it off at the damn shopping mall or ship it back to Apple to have it worked on. Aside from the Mac Pro most of Apple's stuff notoriously runs hot.