Mac Studio discussion

The Lounge General Discussion
#21

I got the base model Max with 64GB RAM. If you adjust the fans to 1100 rpm the noise is inaudible at working distance. I recorded with my iPhone, 35 cm from the Studio. First part of the clip with the mac off and the second on at 1100 rpm. At the end dropping a pin at next to the mac (at the height of the machine). Noise level at the recording distance, 26dB with the machine on. However, with the fans at 1300 rpm there is a slight whine audible in the third part of the clip.

Regarding the amount of RAM. Caught mine using 38 GB yesterday, running about 10 hi-res images in Affinity Photo, Ableton (few plugins), Node, bunch of tabs open in Firefox/Chrome.

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#22

Yes or a crappy interface

#23

Iā€™d say 32gb is more than enough. If youā€™re a programmer living through the current inefficiency nightmare of containerisation and k8s etc, then you need the RAM cos running software now means running virtual datacentres inside your machine.

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#24

The question is how many years do you tend to keep your gear and if you have other use cases than music. Iā€™d say a studio is more useful for a developer or someone doing video production right now and is probably overkill for audio anyway. What about 8 years? Who knows, maybe all of them will have died from some obscure defect we donā€™t know of yet anyway.

#25

ā€¦the max ā€œonlyā€ version will do all fineā€¦for years and years and further updates to comeā€¦
32 gigs of unified ram will take u anywhere and beyond, as long u donā€™t go short on the internal ssdā€¦make that 1tb and ur good to go with ableton and whatsoever til the end of this decadeā€¦at least.

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#26

Thanks everyone, Iā€™ve ordered the most basic model (Max, 24 gpu, 32gb), only increased storage to 1 TB.

Thanks for expanded technical explanation.

Unfortunately own one. Now I can invest these 460 euro that I saved by getting 32 instead of 64 into some Motu or whatever.

Perhaps I can avoid it. Iā€™m working with Figma, which is vector.

UI/UX design

done)

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#27

I actually ordered the same configuration (64GB, 2TB, Max ā€¦ as a ā€œWebDevā€/Audio-Box). Hopefully the fan noise is acceptable.

#28

32GB when itā€™s a System On A Chip is definitely plenty.

I have 32GB of much lower bandwidth memory on my 2015 i7 iMac 5k, and it is way more than enough.

If they made a 16GB Mac Studio that was $200-$300 less, Iā€™d be buying that. Too bad they do not. Hereā€™s to hoping for a Mac mini refresh with 10 core M1 Pros

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#29

Let us know how it fares regarding the fan noise, please.

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#30

I am going full specs with this mac studio.
Bit of an overkill for sure but I use it all day every day for work. I am gonna treat myself.
My only concern is the fan noise, my studio is very quiet, my current 2015 MBP is so very loud even when just using Chrome.

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#31

Yeah, I struggled with my 2015ā€ MBP. I have an MBP M1 Max with 32GB ram and when I think I hear the fans its always my apartment ventilation I hear :grinning:

I use Ableton and the fans kicked in when I copied one of my projects 9 times in the same project. That was about 675 tracks with plugins. That was without CPU heavy plugins like Acustica audio. So itā€™s really different and when they kicked in, it was much more quiet than the fans on the 2015.

#32

I am so looking forward to putting convolution reverbs everywhere

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#33

Itā€™s huge!! Only another 20-24 days to wait for the monitor :tired_face:

image
image4032Ɨ3024 2.88 MB

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#34

These can be massive memory hogs.

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#35

I wish there was a container system for Macs which didnā€™t force a VM to run at the bottom of the stack. I can imagine the arguments ā€œbut thatā€™s not a reproducable buildā€ā€¦ but meh.

#36

They finally made a Mac Cube that works!! :crossed_fingers:t2:

#37

For Ā£3k it better work :crossed_fingers::crossed_fingers::rofl::rofl:

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#38

howā€™s the fan noise mate? is it true that the fans are always spinning even when idle?
thanks

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#39

indeed, they are on all the time. Seems an odd choiceā€¦ I can tell something is on in the studio, itā€™s not THAT loud, but something is there that wasnā€™t before if that makes sense. All that said, its not in its final position yet, so hard to judge.

#40

alright thanks
hopefully it will be possible to turn the fans off when idle with a script or something

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