A look at budget systems by Sweetwater Creation Stations and Rain Recording.

You were probably taught "you get what you pay for". This idea holds true when applied to the world of DAWs. For those who are budget conscious it is assumed that the goal is the highest quality for the lowest price. Just because someone out there is providing the lowest cost system does not mean that they have the best deal. Is this going to be a system that you can grow with and expand into the future, is this last year's technology, or was this system state of the art three years ago? These are the sort of things that you need to be looking at when in the market for a new DAW; you don't want to be working on a project and discover your track count is maxed out already, you can't use those great new effects that you just bought, or of all things, hardware incompatibility. These are all things that must be taken into account when in the market for an affordable DAW, because cost is more than money, and the wrong decision can cost you a lot more in the long run.


Some of our competition, in order to be priced below us, have for sale some "budget" systems. While I am sure they would be fine for someone doing very light duty use, we created this page so you can see that you are getting what you pay for or less, and in most cases much less.

A few key points:

Power supply: The power supply plays an important role in quieting a DAW. However, what's far more important is the total real wattage and quality of the power supply. The power supply is often the most overlooked part, while being one of the most crucial ones. Cheap power supplies will have a rating of 500W but in reality may only output 350W. You can have the fastest everything else but if you are underpowered it will cause system instability as well as component failure in short time. It is also the most difficult to troubleshoot, causing you to think it's numerous other things instead of the power supply. Finding a quality power supply that outputs wattage equal to its supposed rating is not easy. Add to that finding one that is quiet and has longevity narrows the field greatly.
Not to mention the ability to expand the system. In our opinion the minimum power supply should be a 550W. It would seem some of our competition does not share the same ideology.

Motherboard: It's our desire to give you longevity in your studio. While we like to sell DAWs we don't think you should have to buy one every year. Thus, we believe in having the most forward looking, upgrade possible motherboard's.

Processor: Here is the biggest issue with these "budget" systems.
Do not be fooled by marketing hype and web site glitz! While a 2.6G AMD processor (Rain) may appear faster than a 2.33G Core 2 Duo (Us) it is by no means even close.
An Intel Core 2 duo 3.0G (E6850) 1333 is 65% more powerful than an AMD 3.0G (M2 6000) for Audio. See here for benchmarks.
Both are dual core (two physical processors on one socket).
the Core 2 Duo E6350 (Us) is 60-200% faster than the Pentium dual core (SW) uses. we didnt even bother to bench those but for comparison you can look at the Pentium D 2.8G vs the E series for an idea. (bearing in mind what SW uses is 2.0g)
Of the three cheapest (of our competitors), the Rain is faster than the Sweetwater Creation Stations LE, It takes theCS Plus to beat us (2.66G 1333 fsb vs 2.33G 1333 fsb) and at $1899 vs $1233 it had better. (for $23 more we are equal, for $103 we are @ 3.0G)
The CS+ listed is still much more.

Memory: The faster the memory (and more of it) the more samples/VSTi's and effects you can run. (memory has little to do with track count).
*sweetwater has finally updated their systems to have DDR2 800! (previously 533) Cas Latency (CL) is important for high sample counts. A CL rating of 4 will allow for more VSTi than CL5

Quiet: Since I have not "heard" either the Rain or CS systems, this is an educated "guess" and can not be taken as fact but opinion.
With the very old Pentium 4s CPU temperatures tended to run very high, so the stock Intel fan was obnoxiously loud (since the fan had to run at a very high RPM to eliminate that heat). Add to that very loud power supplies and I can only imagine the noise level. The CS's have acoustical noise dampening so a point in their favor.
However the use of such insulation is to be considered only after you address power supply, case fans, CPU fans, and a fanless Video card. That leaves only the hard drives, which are the loudest items in a "properly" quieted system. The only option to assist in absorbing the noise of a hard drive is acoustical dampening. The foam is wasted with any of the other components not being addressed.

Warranty/Support: Some of our competitors' web sites are very unclear just what their warranty and support is.
After several calls to Sweetwater (playing customer) I still was unsure of the exact warranty and support as I received varying and changing answers from 2 different sales reps.
I will have to comment that Sweetwater's support probably rivals ours, whereas the warranty was very unclear (particularly who pays shipping for service/repair).
Rain's warranty: Here Extremely limited until you pay up $349 extra.
Sweetwater's Warranty: (sorta)Here bottom of page.
Our Warranty: Here middle of page.

Summation: Personally I would have a hard time placing the CS LE and Solstice systems on a web site that is supposed to be for Pro Audio. Yes I understand many of us are on a tight budget and for many Pro Audio is a hobby. We have always been the "working man's" company with our prices far below most of the competition.
And in fact an Apples... oops, maybe I should say oranges to oranges comparison we are priced far less than those listed here.
IF you need a budget system please call as we do have one with far better specs than seen here.

Both companies sell higher spec'ed systems than listed here, but this was about the "budget" systems offered.

I feel you have only two great choices in this business for fair pricing, quality products and great support. Either ADK or Sonica Labs. Don't like us or our web site? Please go talk to Sonica Labs.

Last updated: 2-13-08

Notes:
** Configured similarly to the Rain Livebook unit
*** Tested with two of our benchmark tests for audio, Sonar 6 test and Nuendo/Cubase test and also Ivory through Cubase with 48 polyphony. Tests can be downloaded Here.

Every time a new processor is released we have to go thru testing numerous laptops in hopes of finding 1 or 2 that perform great. In doing this we had also tested the same Models as the Rain Livebook.

We found that Presonus, Focusrite, Yamaha, Digidesign, Mackie, and even M-Audio either didn't work at all or were near unusable with the models Rain uses. Only RME and Motu worked and then only to 512 Buffer.
(we did not nor do we test USB interfaces). By adding a Texas Instrument Express card to Firewire it improves things slightly, allowing to go to 256 buffer but not perfectly clean. This also means losing the Express slot for better things like Esata.

Not all laptops are created equal. While they may appear to have the same specs (processor, memory, harddrive), the performance for Pro audio is drastically different.
Most name brand laptops will NOT work for Pro audio as they are plagued with resource allocation issues, IRQ conflicts and poor BIOS.

Contrary to popular belief no one makes their own laptops. In other words Dell is made by someone as is Apple, Gateway, etc.
There are 9 or so ODMs (manufacturer's of laptops) in the world.
Clevo, Quanta, Compal, Mitac, Asus, MSI, Twinhead, Uniwill/ECS, Arima, Movita.


While this has to do with both Intel and AMD I will confine this to Intel as AMD Laptops are underpowered.

Intel Core 2 Duo, and Santa Rosa (core 2 duo with 800 fsb)

1) Chipsets: The main chipset is the Intel 945 PM/GM (GM indicates onboard video) and 965. And this is not the issue. The Chipset issue is what is being used for the Cardbus(if it actually still has one), memory card reader, modem, network, Firewire, or what's called combo chipsets (everything on one controller).

Ricoh: (Asus and others) a lot of incompatibility with audio interfaces and general poor performance.
ENE: (compal and others) same as above, the Cardbus is horrid. Usually with Via Firewire. The Via Firewire does better than Ricoh.
Realtek: now found on several laptops, not just as audio, but audio, card reader, Cardbus, modem, Firewire.
Texas Instruments: Firewire and Cardbus (again Cardbus is gone from most new laptops). The chipset to have!

2) BIOS: most laptops are 512k some are 1 meg, where a desktop will have 4meg- 8meg.
This is probably the biggest issue. The BIOS for the most part is responsible for IRQ and resource allocation. A small and poorly written BIOS is what causes so many things to be lumped onto one IRQ.
ACPI handles this.
Microsoft developer site

With laptops you have “hot swap” devices (cardbus, Express slot and more), and this adds to the issue. Understanding that resource allocation is memory based (name space and virtual memory), a small BIOS has a hard time allocating space for all potential product IDs.

Add to that we now have PCIe even more BIOS issues arise.
More from Microsoft.

“Insufficient bridge resources appear when the platform BIOS cannot assign appropriate PCI-bridge resource windows during POST. Systems supporting hot-plug PCI devices are particularly problematic. When a PCI device can be hot-plugged behind a PCI bridge at run time, it is impossible for the BIOS to ascertain during POST how large a bridge resource window must be to accommodate a device. Additionally, a PCI bridge device might be hot plugged in certain situations—for example, in generic docking solutions that connect through CardBus adapters”

“””The previous scenarios are exacerbated with the emergence of PCI Express. PCI Express defines many bridge devices that are used to represent ports, thereby making complex bridge hierarchies more prevalent. Additionally, PCI Express hot-plug will be widely used in desktop and workstation client systems, so hot-plug scenarios will not be limited to large servers.

“” So small BIOS means less ability to handle ACPI steering and resources in “virtual space”

3) Expectation of ODM: Most laptops are NOT designed to be used as workstations. The vendors never expected this. Laptops are designed to be light weight, have long battery life, and be used mostly by business people on the go, or typical home user surfing the net, playing music, and so on. Therefore they program the BIOS in a careless manner.

Here is more about how its left to the individual ODM to program the bios.

“””The rules for the above programmable ranges are:
1. ALL of these ranges MUST be unique and NON-OVERLAPPING. It is the BIOS or system designers responsibility to limit memory population so that adequate PCI, PCI Express, High BIOS, PCI Express Memory Mapped space, and APIC memory space can be allocated.
2. In the case of overlapping ranges with memory, the memory decode will be given priority.
3. There are no Hardware Interlocks to prevent problems in the case of overlapping ranges.
4. Accesses to overlapped ranges may produce indeterminate results.
5. The only peer-to-peer cycles allowed below the top of memory (register TOLUD) are DMI to PCI Express VGA range writes. Note that peer to peer cycles to the Internal Graphics VGA range are not supported.”””

Taken from Intel's whitepapers Here

A few manufacturers put more thought into it. Again the more expensive Texas Instruments chipset is a good indication that there was consideration for use as a workstation. The BIOS will be a bit more open and better programming as well as usually larger. The more different chipsets there are internally the more likely they will have their own resources, as opposed to everything in one chipset. So that about covers the less obvious (hard drives, memory etc)