Pushing the new iMac

I hate this man, Steve Job, he kept coming out with these beautiful computer with affordable price that use Intel duo technology...a screamer. Sporting all aluminum body and keyboard (so dam thin), the new iMac is a screamer. It come with only 2 versions, the 20" and 24" screen with upgradeable memory up to 4Gig compare to the old one with only 3Gig RAM. And the thing that impress me with this machine is that its top gun is at 2.8 GHz blazing mad speed demon. The i/o's are not bad either, now with both 400 and 800 firewire slot...and Digital I/O for audio, you heard me. Is Apple waving its fist at Digidesign?
Ok all the talks will not do it so I got one from my old friend, who works for Apple, a loaner so I can test run this sweetie out pro audio wise.


In mid music project for a band and the other is audio for my friend film. I transfer both projects over to the iMac from my G5 desktop, to see if this new iMac can handle it.

For the music project I have all 28 track running with full insert plug in's in every single track and 5 of those are RTAS instrument tracks with all sort of softsynths and samplers. Hooking up to a Digidesign 003 firewire and external FW800 hard drive, the iMac did not even blink once. I pushed it a bit harder by increasing track count up to 40 when I see a bit of lag but dam this baby is good. For home recording an iMac with this your choice of audio digital interface, you can really do alot. I also test out the digital audio by having the iMac digital audio out to the Benchmark DAC-1 DA with Adam A7's monitors, I barely could tell the different between that and the Digidesign 003...now that impressive.

My audio film project is running Protool HD 5 Accel with high resolution video on one track and 73 tracks of audio, which 40 of them are stereo tracks. I mix it down to 32 stems and one track of high res. video and the iMac had no problem at all. But this is with one track handle high resolution video, I know this is plenty and could get more track count if I compress the video to lo-res instead. I love this machine.

Of course I am not buying one 'cause I got my G5 already and very sad to return the iMac back to my friend at Apple. I have no problem recommending this set up to any multimedia artist who on the budget. Video editing, audio work station, photographic materials, web, etc...not bad for $1200.00

Tran Duy