The Dreaded Upgrade...

So you might remember that I mentioned before that I planned on getting the Wizoo W2 Reverb plugin. Well, I've had it for some time now and have been using it and trying to form my opinion about it. But that's not what I'm writing about tonight.
That's just the back story to something every engineer faces here in the digital age...The Dreaded Computer Upgrade.
I was in the middle of a mix of one of my more ambitious tracks and was using a good number of plugins including my new Wizoo Reverb. I dialed in the setting I wanted which happened to use HDIR (High Definition Impulse Reverb); a very CPU intensive effect. And that was it. My computer had had it. Three times I tried to finish the mix and three times my computer made sure I knew it wasn't having any part of it. So you know what that means...Upgrade!
Yep. Upgrade has a positive connotation to it. You know, improvement and all. But as anyone who has been through an upgrade knows, it's usually a terribly painful process. Especially when building a machine for audio only use and of course, time is money!
My new gear came today. Got it from Newegg.com which is not my usual vendor, but they had the best price for what I wanted. Of course ProTools is pretty picky about what it will work with (although I must admit, there are many more choices now). I ended up getting an ASUS mobo (motherboard), the AV8-MX, a socket 939. Couple that with an AMD Athlon 64 spec'ed out to 3200+ with a 2GHZ front side bus. And finally a gig of Kingston RAM. Total $230 (including shipping). So not too bad.
I was nervous for days before the actual upgrade, thinking I'd spend days reinstalling software and troubleshooting hardware. But guess what. Everything was perfect. In fact, I didn't even reformat my hard drive, didn't reinstall my OS, didn't lose ANYTHING. All in all, from box to finish it took about 3 hours. Unprecedented.
I'm not analyzing. I'll just take what I can get.

Anyway, I'm about to buy some new equipment so I'm sure I'll be back to gear reviews soon.

Bruce Springsteen The Ghost of Tom Joad right now.

Rock On

Ben
www.javboyrecords.com