Like Mr. Ploudre, I have long
railed against the constant hum of my Mac. As a composer and audio
engineer, I need to be able to hear fine details in the music with
which I'm working. The white noise of my G3's fan greatly obscures
those details, and completely changes the way I listen to and write
music - not for the better, I might add.
However, I suspect Mr. Ploudre's solution of getting a used
PowerBook won't work for many audio engineers, if any. Audio hardware
is usually designed with machines like the Power Mac G3 in mind: There
are plenty of great PCI audio cards, but few, if any, PCMCIA cards of
professional quality (and I tend to think, should they exist, they'd be
prohibitively expensive). On top of that, audio software is as
RAM-hungry as ever - and PowerBook RAM has never been cheap, to say the
least.
Furthermore, neither the iMac nor the Cube can be satisfactory,
either, since they aren't expandable enough - and, as Mr. Ploudre
pointed out, the iMac is not a silent machine. Nor is the Cube.
The best solution for many of us is, I think, distance. I can't
offer details on every possible solution, but I can talk about an
approach used at my most recent place of employment, an audio
engineering studio.
No job is perfect, and this one certainly wasn't by a long shot. But
one of the nice things about this place was that it was not only a
Macintosh-based studio, but had a lot of low-end Mac hardware. On a
daily basis, machines like the Centris 650 and the Power Computing 100 were getting heavy use,
thanks to proprietary networking cards from Sonic Solutions. (Indeed,
we even had a "lowly" Performa
475, which happily did its part - making labels and maintaining
client databases.) Oddly enough, the one G3 we had, a beige minitower, was probably
the most problematic machine of them all, whereas the Quadra 950 was practically
uncrashable!
The main part of the studio was divided into five relatively small
booths in which all of the actual audio work was done. The noise from
the computers would've been prohibitive at best, had they been in the
same room. So when the studio was built, the owner arranged to have
panels with connections for ethernet and 5-pin video (as well as XLR
connections for AES/EBU, a protocol for digital audio) put into each
booth. The panels were all wired to a "machine room" in which all of
the computers were housed. For the keyboard and mouse, we used homemade
ethernet-to-ADB converter boxes at each end. For the video, we used
custom-made VGA-to-5-pin cables. All that was needed in each room
(besides our audio equipment) was a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor,
along with their respective cables or converter boxes.
The result? Total silence, and it was great! Sure, it was a bit
inconvenient to have to run back to the machine room every time you
needed to, say, put in a new CD to burn. But overall, it was a very
effective solution. It not only let us do our job properly, but also
saved our ears from a lot of fatigue.
Obviously, nothing so complex need be done for most cases. But it's
worth knowing that this ethernet-to-ADB solution can work. I believe,
though I may be mistaken, that in terms of signal degradation, ethernet
cable may be more robust over longer distances than ADB cable. I
don't know the details, but I remember being told that we were
exceeding Apple's spec with our solution - the implication being, I
think, that using RJ-45 (ethernet) cable somehow made it possible to do
so.
Because we worked with high-end digital audio and proprietary
hardware, we had to use special solutions to get our digital audio
signal back to the rooms in which we worked. However, for people who
just want to listen to MP3s while they work - or even for simple
digital audio editing - long cables will again do the trick. Running
long speaker cables is one possible solution; you could keep an
amplifier near your computer, wherever it may be, and simply run
speaker cable to wherever you needed it. Cable of reasonable quality
ought to be up to the challenge. The idea of running long RCA cables,
on the other hand, is probably a bad one; the signal degradation could
be considerable.
I'd be interested, by the way, in hearing about any attempts to do
something similar with USB, since all of the newer Macs lack ADB ports.
Perhaps a straight cable run would do the trick?
In any event, I can say this with assurance: If you're listening to
music with the hum of your computer's fan in the background, you're
likely missing out on a wealth of detail and dynamic contrast. I listen
to a great deal of ambient and classical music, and there are myriad
pieces that simply don't sound in a noisy environment. The
relationship of music to silence can be a highly important one - and
it's a relationship which is badly damaged when that silence is
disrupted by white noise.
So consider going silent!
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