Re: X32 Recording Hardware Requirements For A New Recording Setup
Honestly any decent laptop will do the job, USB or Firewire. Yes, generally speaking firewire is better for audio but as previously mentioned, multi track recording is not really that big of a deal for modern hardware. My 4 year old Dell Inspiron (soon to be replaced with a macbook pro) with a core 2 duo and 3 gigs ram will do 32 tracks on reaper all day long without breaking a sweat. Reaper is a good choice not only because of the price, but also because its extremely light on computer resources compared to other daws. And although I've never used it on a Mac, judging by the reaper forums it appears to be a tad more stable on PC due to the fact that Windows is essentially its native OS.
At any rate, sure, a macbook pro with firewire is never a bad idea for anything audio. However almost any new decent PC recording via USB will treat you just fine. I installed an X32 and a PC desktop in my club gig. I put a firewire card in the PC, but I tried the USB recording and the stability, CPU usage, and performance, were pretty much identical. As in, neither one of them appeared to have any affect on the computers performance when multi-tracking 32 tracks off the X32.
