iMac - what to go with for recording?

[bass12]

I'm about to replace my old MacBook Pro with an iMac. There are a couple of questions I have, however, that I'm hoping someone with more experience can maybe help me with (oh, and my main interest where this computer is concerned is recording and editing sound - no gaming, though maybe some simple video editing). The first question concerns the processor. I was thinking I'd go with the 3.4GHz i5 but is there a good reason I should be going with the 3.6GHz i7 instead? My other question is, should I be seriously considering spending the extra money on an SSD or sticking with the 1 TB Fusion Drive that comes standard with the computer? I like the idea of the SSD but would prefer to not spend the extra money if I'm not likely to notice much of a difference.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

 

[Moody Tuner]

I’m no help at all. I completely maxed out my 2017 iMac. No regrets. I intend to use this thing for the next 10 years at least. It’s easier to get the bells and whistles now, than to have memory added later, etc. They don’t build them to be easily accessible for repairs. Definitely go SSD. A fusion drive has moveable parts and will likely fail some day. If you splurge on a component, do that one... and memory.

 

[DrummerwStrings]

^Well, maybe. SSD is faster, so faster boot times. Not as much memory, tho - you'll fill it with your projects faster. Consider a hybrid drive: it's a traditional HDD with an SSD built in, so you can get the SSD speed & the 1TB+ space.

Things fall apart. SSD drives can fail at the worst possible time, too. More chances of trouble as well, since your computer is now portable. Have a backup plan - get, say a 2-4 TB hard drive & periodically back up your data (& keep it in a separate place). By the time your backup is almost full, you can backup your backup.

In the meantime, you can shop around and read reviews on SSD & hybrid drives, save some $ & be on the lookout for a nice sale. But I would shop for a good backup drive first - it's a must have; SSD is not.

 

[eJake]

RAM is important for recording if I remember correctly.

 

[J Posega]

Unless you’re doing really huge complex projects with tons of active plugins, I don’t think the faster processor will help much.

You absolutely need to max out the RAM.

A solid state drive is going to be faster. Keep the fusion drive and buy an external hard drive for backups. Do not get into recording without having a drive to backup everything you do onto it.

 

[silky smoove]

I was thinking I'd go with the 3.4GHz i5 but is there a good reason I should be going with the 3.6GHz i7 instead?

Look up the geekbench scores these models (Invalid Link Removed). Make sure you're looking at single core vs multi core as is applicable. The higher the number the better the performance. Find your previous laptop's score as well so you have a common reference point.

My other question is, should I be seriously considering spending the extra money on an SSD or sticking with the 1 TB Fusion Drive that comes standard with the computer?

The Fusion drive is really slick. It is an SSD and it is a HDD. The most commonly used programs (including the OS itself) and frequently accessed files are kept on the SSD portion whereas the stuff that's only used periodically stay on the HDD portion. Going fully SSD is really slick and does net some performance gains. That said, comparing SSD to Fusion is not the same as comparing SSD to HDD. The gains are not as large for your situation. I suspect you'd be just fine with the Fusion.

Consider a hybrid drive: it's a traditional HDD with an SSD built in, so you can get the SSD speed & the 1TB+ space.

That's exactly what the Fusion drive that comes standard in the machine is. Very cool product.

Unless you’re doing really huge complex projects with tons of active plugins, I don’t think the faster processor will help much.

The big processor drain comes from virtual instruments running in real time. Depending on how they're implemented they might work only off of a single core as opposed to spreading out across multiple (if applicable to your system). I've seen some incredibly processor heavy VSTs that upon closer inspection weren't that bad, but they max out a single core while the others are sitting nearly at idle and as a result the system crashes with only a small percentage of its potential being utilized. Fortunately this type of thing seems to be going away in favor of better implementation.

 

[bass12]

Thank you for the very helpful feedback guys.

 

[DirkP]

SSD and lots of RAM are the best things you can invest into, much more important than the processor.
I would stay away from hybrid drives. Or - as an alternative - buy an external SSD for your recording projects.

 

[silky smoove]

One important thing to remember is that even a current base model iMac has more than enough computing power to easily handle the sessions that most home users will be running. My (now archaic) late 2012 Mac Mini (2.3ghz Quad Core i7, 16gb RAM, single HDD) has handled simultaneous tracking of 16 inputs, as well as mixing tasks that involved over 60 tracks some of which had live VSTs and plenty of power-hungry plugins. You'll be hard pressed to go wrong.

 

[DrummerwStrings]

That's exactly what the Fusion drive that comes standard in the machine is. Very cool product.

+1 Sounds like a nice drive to include standard - I'm beginning to shop for an iMac myself, which is why I clicked on this thread. I'd make a backup & max RAM more of a priority & skip the SSD for some time. FYI another good site is Tomswardware.com.

 

[DrummerwStrings]

One important thing to remember is that even a current base model iMac has more than enough computing power to easily handle the sessions that most home users will be running. My (now archaic) late 2012 Mac Mini (2.3ghz Quad Core i7, 16gb RAM, single HDD) has handled simultaneous tracking of 16 inputs, as well as mixing tasks that involved over 60 tracks some of which had live VSTs and plenty of power-hungry plugins. You'll be hard pressed to go wrong.

Thx, this post is worth checking out the thread (& helping OP)

 

[mapleglo]

The interface used will also make a difference. I have an iMac, but am also using an Apollo twin, which takes on some of the processing.

Final Studio

• mapleglo
• Feb 28, 2018
• recording studio

What I'm hoping is the final studio setup

 

[honeyiscool]

Audio is not CPU heavy. It’s more hard drive limited than anything else. The SSD is absolutely necessary.

 

[bass12]

Audio is not CPU heavy. It’s more hard drive limited than anything else. The SSD is absolutely necessary.

Thanks for the reply. Why do you say that the SSD is absolutely necessary? There seem to be a number of people who feel it isn't...

 

[honeyiscool]

Thanks for the reply. Why do you say that the SSD is absolutely necessary? There seem to be a number of people who feel it isn't...

When you have large track counts, you can easily make up for CPU by bouncing or freezing your tracks, but then you offload that onto the hard drive. I actually use an older hyperthreaded dual core MacBook Pro for recording (2013, I think) and I've actually never, ever run across not having enough CPU, and I do plenty of things like convolution reverb, Izotope multi-effects plugins, amp modeling plugins, etc. But when I had a 7200 rpm drive, I ran across plenty of times when the hard drive just wouldn't be fast enough for a full project with two dozen or so 24-bit audio tracks (keep in mind that a single drum performance can be 12 tracks by itself). I replaced the hard drive with a 2 TB unit a couple years ago (yes, it was extremely expensive), and I've never had a single dropout since.

 

[bass12]

When you have large track counts, you can easily make up for CPU by bouncing or freezing your tracks, but then you offload that onto the hard drive. I actually use an older hyperthreaded dual core MacBook Pro for recording (2013, I think) and I've actually never, ever run across not having enough CPU, and I do plenty of things like convolution reverb, Izotope multi-effects plugins, amp modeling plugins, etc. But when I had a 7200 rpm drive, I ran across plenty of times when the hard drive just wouldn't be fast enough for a full project with two dozen or so 24-bit audio tracks (keep in mind that a single drum performance can be 12 tracks by itself). I replaced the hard drive with a 2 TB unit a couple years ago (yes, it was extremely expensive), and I've never had a single dropout since.

Are you talking specifically about hard drives or are you including Fusion drives in your above description?

 

[honeyiscool]

Are you talking specifically about hard drives or are you including Fusion drives in your above description?

Fusion drives don't really put any of the data on the faster solid state layer. You need the fastest read (and write) speed possible when your track counts increase. Regular spinning hard drives can read about 128 MB/s (and a Fusion drive when recording is basically a regular platter drive) and an SSD can easily read over 500 MB/s. If you record at 24-bit 44.1 KHz, that's 132 KB/s, and a platter drive would be OK when your track counts are modest. But audio data lives on multiple places on your computer, on different files. The thing about magnetic platter drives is that their random access read speed is quite poor, so it is slower to start reading one file, then it speeds up. SSDs can maintain that random access read speed much better, so as it's reading from multiple files at the same time, it's delivering a lot more speed. Not only that, what's the point of having all that extra CPU if your read speeds are keeping the data from reaching your plugins quickly? The magnetic drive will hold your overall performance back far more than any CPU will.

What I've discovered in recording, especially at higher resolution 88.2 KHz (though I don't record at 88.2 KHz anymore, 44.1 KHz is more than enough), is that magnetic drives are fine for a while. But as I'd get to that stage where all the instruments are recorded and I want to record vocals, by then even a simple song might have 20 tracks. A more complicated one might have 30 by then. That's right around when magnetic drives would be like, "naw, man." So, if you had a song that would have 12-15 more vocal tracks, I'd have to bounce the instrumentals before recording the vocals. Then, there's this whole thing where I can't actually make any real time changes to anything, ever, because any changes in one thing requires me to rebounce whole groups of tracks to give my hard drive a break. I was convinced my CPU was the problem, but out of desperation, I bought an SSD.

Afterward, everything just magically worked. Sometimes, my CPU might get a bit pushed, but freezing a track is so easy in Logic, then it's just all on the hard drive. Any workarounds for a slow hard drive are not so simple.

(Oh, and I don't know if you use Logic, but use Logic. It's cheap for such a full featured piece of software and it's so full featured and saves you money in the long run.)

 

[silky smoove]

Audio is not CPU heavy. It’s more hard drive limited than anything else. The SSD is absolutely necessary.

While you're correct that audio itself is not CPU heavy, plugins and VSTs, especiallys VSTs are absolutely processor heavy. What's worse is they're not frequently optimized to spread their workload across multiple cores if they're available, so you'll end up with one core getting overworked and tanking the system while the remaining cores sit at near idle. I found Omnisphere to be especially bad in this regard, although reportedly Omnisphere 2 does a much better job.

Regarding your points regarding the need for SSD; We're generally in disagreement, which is fine, but we've definitely experienced different things despite using the same DAW (Logic, presumably Pro X). Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with you that given the choice of an SSD, HDD or a hybrid drive like a Fusion the SSD will always be the top contender. That said, on my late-2012 Mac Mini (2.3ghz quad core i7, 16GB RAM, and a standard 1TB HDD) I've frequently run sessions with up to 16 simultaneous inputs being recorded at 44.1 for audio and 48 for audio intended for video, as well as mixing sessions with track counts in excess of 60, and had zero issues with my HDD. Again, it would absolutely be better with an SSD, but I've never found it to be absolutely necessary. More a case of "better with it, but you can still work quite well even without it" as opposed to a hard and fast "need." If I were working in 88.1, 96 or higher with the same number of tracks I'm sure I would run into trouble. Fortunately like you I've stopped bothering working at those higher resolutions unless asked specifically by the client, which these days is basically never.

 

[bass12]

Thank you @honeyiscool and @silky smoove for your feedback. I'm still a bit torn between the Fusion and SSD but I guess I'll have to make up my mind sooner than later! And yes, I'll be running Logic.

 

[honeyiscool]

While you're correct that audio itself is not CPU heavy, plugins and VSTs, especiallys VSTs are absolutely processor heavy. What's worse is they're not frequently optimized to spread their workload across multiple cores if they're available, so you'll end up with one core getting overworked and tanking the system while the remaining cores sit at near idle. I found Omnisphere to be especially bad in this regard, although reportedly Omnisphere 2 does a much better job.

Regarding your points regarding the need for SSD; We're generally in disagreement, which is fine, but we've definitely experienced different things despite using the same DAW (Logic, presumably Pro X). Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with you that given the choice of an SSD, HDD or a hybrid drive like a Fusion the SSD will always be the top contender. That said, on my late-2012 Mac Mini (2.3ghz quad core i7, 16GB RAM, and a standard 1TB HDD) I've frequently run sessions with up to 16 simultaneous inputs being recorded at 44.1 for audio and 48 for audio intended for video, as well as mixing sessions with track counts in excess of 60, and had zero issues with my HDD. Again, it would absolutely be better with an SSD, but I've never found it to be absolutely necessary. More a case of "better with it, but you can still work quite well even without it" as opposed to a hard and fast "need." If I were working in 88.1, 96 or higher with the same number of tracks I'm sure I would run into trouble. Fortunately like you I've stopped bothering working at those higher resolutions unless asked specifically by the client, which these days is basically never.

It might very well be that because you have a hyper-threaded desktop grade quad core processor vs. my measly much slower hyper-threaded laptop-grade dual core processor, that my processor needs THE fastest I/O to keep up, whereas yours doesn't. And I suppose I don't use any crazy software synthesis. In any case, I tend to freeze my software tracks very quickly after I'm done recording them, then it takes the CPU use out of the equation.

(And yep, if you're ever working in 88.1 or 96, you're definitely going to be in trouble. Thankfully, the audio world kind of got over the whole high-resolution audio fad.)