It's been a while since posting here and in truth there's not been a whole lot happening. I have had a bit of studio downtime relating to DAW issues, mostly due to the fact I'd had some Windows 7 problems. I had actually run Windows update on the the DAW to bring it up to date with the view to updating the system to Windows 10 which was due to be released on the 29th July.
I had the W7 fully updated and had started to encounter playback issues with Cubase, something that I had never had in the past perhaps due to the fact that I had never installed Windows updates from a certain point when everything was very stable. I made the decision to apply the Windows 10 update on the system with the hope that it would improve stability. Perhaps a risky strategy, bearing in mind that Steinberg had not announced official compatibility with 10 as yet. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it didn't go well and I spent a lot of time troubleshooting including doing a clean install of Windows 10 without great success, to finally question whether the issues might be down to my graphics card, a fairly old 256MB nVidia card. I picked up a middle of the road 2GB nVidia card installed it in the system and hey presto the DAW comes back to life and much closer to the stability prior to the Windows 7 updates. I can only assume that an nVidia driver update had actually caused the problem - anyway, all was good now.
Prior to these events I had been considering building a new DAW to bring the hardware up to speed, so I decided to revisit the idea. I had looked at all the options of the latest spec Intel i7 CPU and suitable hardware and the costs were spiralling. My other option was to put together a machine from an older i7 generation motherboard I had available, an Intel DX58OG LGA1366 board. It is a pretty high spec board and could support up to 24GB of RAM and has plenty of expansion potential. Another plus point is that it has USB 3.0 ports and one legacy ISA slot which would perhaps allow me to keep the UAD1 card that I'm still using - believe it or not.
I wanted to maximise the power of this system to ensure it had decent lifespan and could deal with everything that I would be throwing at it, admittedly not a lot. I was able to get hold of an Intel Xeon W3690 3.47GHz 6-core CPU from ebay, the maximum that this board would support. The complete build is as follows:
- Windows 10 Pro 64bit
- Intel Desktop Board DX58OG
- Intel Xeon W3690 SLBW2 3.46Ghz Six-Core LGA1366
- 24GB Total - Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333MHz Memory Module Non-ECC
- Corsair CX 600W Fully Wired 80+
- 1 X Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5inch SSD for OS
- 1 X Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5inch SSD for LIBRARY
- 1 X SEAGATE 1TB HDD for PROJECTS
- nVidia GEFORCE GT 730 2GB DDR3
- 1 X UAD-1 DSP Card
- 2 X Acer 24" LCD Monitor
- Focusrite Saffire PRO 24 DSP Audio/MIDI interface
- Midiman Midisport 2x2 MIDI interface
- Cubase Pro 8.0.30 64bit DAW
- WaveLab 8.5.30 64bit Audio Mastering/Editing
- Halion 5.1.10 64bit Sampler and Sound Creation
- Harrison MixBus 3 DAW
During this process at some point Steinberg had announced compatibility with W10 after having identified an issue with W10 that Microsoft had to fix. In addition, I had bought Harrison MixBus 3 DAW which has been an interesting and rewarding exercise. MixBus has been working pretty well throughout the problems and although not anywhere near the features of Cubase adopts a stripped back approach to recording/mixing closer to a hardware based mixer environment.
The above newly built DAW is working extremely well so far which hasn't cost a fortune to put together and should see me for the next few years, all being well.
At the end of the summer Universal Audio announced that they were going to release a USB 3.0 version of their Apollo Twin Duo interface. As I mention earlier, I am still running a UAD1 card and 32bit plugs via VST bridge, which is still the case with the new DAW. The UAD2 Apollo USB is certainly of interest to me and could present a great option for me to finally move to the UAD2 platform and to the 64bit plugs which are only available for UAD2. The Apollo USB is still not available and it appears that UA have had a technical issue which has delayed its release, but I'll be keeping a look out in the next few weeks.
I did make smallish purchase recently and that was the Focusrite Octo Pre/II ADAT input channel expander which has taken up a spot in the desk rack space. This connects perfectly with the Focusrite Saffire Pro DSP interface and provides 8 addition inputs via ADAT. This had been on the wish list and will also interface with the Apollo USB should I purchase this in the near future.
That turned out to be a longer post than expected and I may add to it as I think of anything else. I really ought to add some new studio photos too as things have changed somewhat since the last ones were taken - we'll see. Bye for now!