Laptop System

[tomh]

What is the highest channel count anyone is using a laptop for? or even one of the all-in-one type, easy to carry pcs?

[Craig Allen]

I'm currently doing 16, but believe I could easily go 24 with another converter. I've got plenty of HP to spare.

[RBIngraham]

What is the highest channel count anyone is using a laptop for? or even one of the all-in-one type, easy to carry pcs?

Well it's not all in one, but I use some Shuttle lunchbox computers and since they have standard card slots I could do a full 72 channels on them. I have done shows with over 50 inputs and 12 to 16 outputs on them no problem.

With a laptop it's not really about the CPU power that is the issue. It's about finding I/O cards that have good low latency performance that provide a lot of I/O. RME is probably the best choice with an ExpressCard sound card of some type. I think they even make a MADI ExpressCard if I'm not mistaken. That should allow for a lot of I/O with a modern laptop that has the right card slots.

[tomh]

what interface and card setups are you guys using?

[lixisoft]

I do 26 inputs all the time with a Core 2 Duo 2.5 laptop and an RME FireFace 800.

[Wurst Werner]

24in24out...Specs are in my signatur;-)
And I have a lightweight Asus Terminator T3 Barebone with a Motu 424 card--> 96 Channels of In&Out..at least theoretically.

[sjpaul]

Currently testing a Toshiba Core 2 Duo with M-Audio Profire 2626, 16 channels so far, just about to add another ADA8K and see how it behaves... all good so far...

[Steve L]

How did you get the Toshiba to work with the profire....I never could get the 3 toshibas people have brought me to work. All 3 switched out to HP or Dell and the profire worked perfectly. Also I just discoverd with an M'Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R you have to leave "high performance" mode unchecked on a Win 7 machine (dell).
Just wondering
Steven Lewis
Mountain View Recording
Audio-Video Electronics
Go Big Blue

[tomh]

steven,

Just looked at the m-audio you are using, very interesting. I also looked at the lightbridge version that allows 32 channels. the price on it is very attractive.

[DominicPerry]

steven,

Just looked at the m-audio you are using, very interesting. I also looked at the lightbridge version that allows 32 channels. the price on it is very attractive.

As Ray LaMontagne says, "Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble..........."

Dominic

[Yogi]

I'm running a Dell Latitude D620 with the docking station that has a pci slot. Put a pci-424 card in it and ran 32 channels in 8 out with quite a bit of processing and was under 45***37; on the cpu.

[AVJAN00]

I use a ASUS laptop with a T6400 @ 2.00 GHZ and Vista 64 as the host machine, M-Audio 2626, Focusrite LE and a Digimax D8. Must of my gigs run close to the 24 channels, 2-3 monitor mixs and lots of compressors etc. I run 1x64 and don't see any slipped buffers and CPU load around 20-30%. I run an adhoc network laptop to laptop wireless and have never had a problem. I record the 24 channels live with SAW light and use a M-Audio Fast Track Pro to send music from FOH and get the SOLO bus to FOH. It's worked really well for me.

[RBIngraham]

steven,

Just looked at the m-audio you are using, very interesting. I also looked at the lightbridge version that allows 32 channels. the price on it is very attractive.

RUN AWAY! :)

[tomh]

run from all m-audio in this area or just this particular model?

I'm looking for the most economical interface solution to get to the i/o's

thanks everyone!

[sjpaul]

How did you get the Toshiba to work with the profire....I never could get the 3 toshibas people have brought me to work. All 3 switched out to HP or Dell and the profire worked perfectly. Also I just discoverd with an M'Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R you have to leave "high performance" mode unchecked on a Win 7 machine (dell).
Just wondering
Steven Lewis
Mountain View Recording
Audio-Video Electronics
Go Big Blue

Steven,

It just worked right away - no issues. Loaded up the Profire drivers and then plugged in the firewire connection. It's an older Toshiba tecra that i picked up s/hand.

Running it at 1 x 64...

[sjpaul]

run from all m-audio in this area or just this particular model?

I'm looking for the most economical interface solution to get to the i/o's

thanks everyone!

I think there are several users running the Profire 2626 with success. As with all FW based systems, probably the weakest link is going to be the connector.

YMMV

[DominicPerry]

It's the same old story, you'll find it repeated all over the forum - if you want to try with M-Audio, go right ahead. Some people have got them working fine, some haven't. If you want the best chance of buying an interface, plugging it in and it working, buy RME.
There are flavours of MOTU that people here have also got working reliably, but you need to watch which models. All the RME stuff works, old and new, Firewire, Cardbus, ExpressCard, USB, PCI, PCIe and they update their drivers regularly. Last time I said that, someone picked up a couple of times when there were problems with Win7 and a new interface, true enough, but that was a while back and they fixed the problem pretty quickly.
My experience of M-Audio is that they are poorly made and poorly supported. If you get it working, it's a good deal. If not, well, it will waste your time. Do you have the time to fiddle and face possible disappointment? If so, give it a try. If not, buy RME.
(Notice that sjpaul the above post, despite supporting the possibility of M-Audio working, has himself got RME in his SAC host).

Dominic

[tomh]

this has been great help, thanks all.

i have rme in the main rig now so i will stay with them. no problems and configuration is worth quite a bit though.

tom

[gdougherty]

run from all m-audio in this area or just this particular model?

I'm looking for the most economical interface solution to get to the i/o's

thanks everyone!

The Lightbridge in particular. I do have a Toshiba that doesn't run the ProFire well but my IBM Thinkpad runs it just fine. It's not nearly as solid and problem free as my rackmount RayDAT based rig, but it works well enough for small gigs.
The biggest issue I've had centers around power. The laptop will happily run without line power, the interface won't. A battery backup for even the little rig is a good idea. Thankfully, I can just shut down SAC, restart the interface, open it back up and everything's fine rather than having to do a full reboot, but it's not trouble free.

[RBIngraham]

run from all m-audio in this area or just this particular model?

I'm looking for the most economical interface solution to get to the i/o's

thanks everyone!

I have had nothing but grief from both the ProFire Lightbridge and the Firewire 410 unit, mostly with other software, but with SAC as well in the case of the LightBridge.

Some others, even a good friend of mine, who really knows his stuff, seem to have different experiences that I have.

I have had times where I spend an entire afternoon trying to get one of those 2 interfaces working on a computer and just had to give up, and then I plug in an Echo or even a MOTU Firewire sound card and it worked perfectly fine. So there was nothing particularly wrong with the firewire port, the controller, the cable, the computer, etc.... It's just that the M-Audio wouldn't get along.

There are lot of reports of fairly good experiences with the 2626, so that seems to be different.

This is just one of those debates that I file under the category of hit or miss. Like I said a couple days ago in another thread, next to best hard drives and best video cards, sound cards are very close in the area of satisfaction reports that will be all over the map. Some folks will swear by a certain make and model and others will swear at them. :D

RME does a pretty decent job of being highly recommended by just about everyone, but I know a few folks that had issues over the years and don't use them.

[dragoodan]

So what I'm getting here is: Regardless of the Laptop, what you really need to look for are the right Audio interfaces? (external)

I have a Focusrite that's working like a charm, and an Audiophile USB from M-audio... lots of latency on that one in MIDI, could not recommend it.

But I want to purchase a laptop to go on the road, I basically just need to be able to run some MIDIs and samples to create tracks, and mix audio files with high quality, I was thinking going Wal-Mart for this :p

Any thoughts?

[sjpaul]

For sure the RME stuff is the business. I do indeed have an RME card in my SAC host machine, but the offer of a s/hand Profire 2626 came up and I knew I had a decent enough spec laptop kicking around to try it on, and it worked. Whether I would have shelled out on a new Profire in the hope of it working, si debatable, but I've trialed it on about 6 smaller gigs so far and it has been solid. As with anything FireWire, I'm always super careful about making sure the connection is well protected.