At the beginning of 2011, I started to become a little more serious about my ‘home studio’. Enough so that I invested in three Presonus Project Studio firewire interfaces, to replace my aging original Firepod along with a pair of Behringer Truth B3031A powered speakers. Next was moving my setup from a back room into my living room. This provided a dual incentive, I would see my setup every day, could easily power up and start recording at any time, and not worry about sweating in a back room with no air conditioning. The only thing I miss is my two LCD monitor setup along with my massive 2T-Byte RAID quad-core workstation.
So far an older P4 ‘D’ 3.0gig machine with a SATA 500G is fine for my ‘power trio’ tracks. For video monitoring I have a 22″ full HD Acer monitor. To eliminate two of my user interface wires, I have a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse. For software, I am still running stable Windows XP, which is compatible with my older audio software (Cubase, Soundforge, and Waves Native Power Pack).
Along with this I have some MIDI equipment; a Yamaha PSR-340 keyboard, Yamaha drum pads, an Alesis SR16 and Alesis D4 percussion module. The MIDI is wired to a single channel on my master Presonus, while an additional two MIDI channels come into the computer via my MIDI Sport USB. For audio monitoring I have the ‘Truth’ speakers or for after hours, SONY studio monitor cans.
My next step will be to get a new PC. After seeing the price of DDR3 RAM drop so low, and the low price of powerful AMD CPUs, I am thinking of jumping out of the Intel/NVidia pool and into the AMD/ATI one instead. The general opinion is that AMD is better than Intel for audio editing anyway. Anyway, this will be a upgrade project for the end of summer.