Presonus just focusing on Mac now?

[bmoremd]

After alot of research and since getting the vsl (still on sale), I've noticed some of the users of the vsl interfaces and maybe in general have gotten better performance on mac than pc with presonus hardware. So I was wondering if they are going the cakewalk route of just making products for just mac in the future? Why is it that their pc drivers suck compared to mac's?The PC drivers are piss poor for the vsl. My friend was able to get to 96samples on his macbook pro. While my pc an i7 can't get below 128 samples on win7.

Presonus should put the same amount of effort into their pc drivers as their mac ones. I will be getting a mac soon, but for pc users this is not fair. From reading the forum, I read about some kind of lawsuit someone could possibly bring, based on the disappointment of the vsl interfaces. Either or I wonder what Teddy Riley's reaction would be if he had a vsl interface and he ran it on pc. Poor drivers for pc is what you get when you hire a CTO over from Mackie.

[Motoko]

Using a lot of PreSonus gear and I haven't noticed any bias towards Mac. Nor am I noticing performance differences between Mac and PC. I run on both platforms with various machines...

[santibanks]

there was a time where I had the idea that it was the other way around…

[Duardo]

Presonus should put the same amount of effort into their pc drivers as their mac ones. I will be getting a mac soon, but for pc users this is not fair.

If they put the same amount of effort into their PC drivers as they do their Mac drivers then their interfaces probably wouldn't work at all. There are so many more variables involved in a PC than a Mac I'd imagine it's a lot more work to get things working at all. Maybe if you can find out a particular combination of motherboard, chipset etc that's working well for others.

[PresonusTester]

This is an age-old battle and honestly (from a 20 year, hardcore PC veteran TechHead) There is a major difference between PC's and Mac's that gives Mac the edge every time:

Macs: Made by a single company. Focused, reliable, using the same components throughout their product line. Hand picked components, designed to work as a single unit and be 99.9% compatible with any other Mac of the same era. Purpose built for Audio, Video, and ease of use. It does what they say it does. The darned things just work 98% of the time. Laptops, Desktops... They all are built to the same demanding standards.

PC's: Untold hundreds or thousands of companies cobble them together from components generally sourced from the lowest bidder. Even those that use premium components 80% of the time still skimp on the good stuff: Firewire, USB Host Controllers, PCI Express Bus, etc. They also run one or another variant of Windows. Build for Networking, Office Productivity, Email and Chat, and sometimes Gaming if you're buying a super-high-end system. General Use, Inexpensive, and most likely unsuitable for professional audio production if you buy them off the shelf. That goes for Laptops and Desktops.


Now, after all of that, you'd think I was an avid Mac user, right?

No. Although I'll never buy another PC laptop unless the paradigm changes dramatically, I have just recently upgraded my Sony Vaio (2009 model with the dreaded Ricoh Chipset) with 8gb ram and a 500gb hybrid drive. I also just spent a week of tweaking and tuning it, performing a full fresh install of Windows 7 and ripping out all the parts that are giving me DPC spikes and causing dropouts!

You'd think with a core2duo, 8gb ram, 7200rpm hybrid drive... Sony... I should have no issues at all. Right?

The reality is that PC's require a certain amount of tuning, maintenance and careful internet browsing if you want to use them for Pro Audio applications. Especially laptops! On my old athalon x2 desktop with 4gb ram and XP, I get down to 256 samples of buffer (which is PLENTY fast!). On my Core2Duo listed above, I get the same buffer performance, but I can have more tracks and synths and audio clips running at once.


Your i7 getting down to 128 isn't bad at all. Its normal.
Mac's are better at achieving low latency because they are designed to do so. Ol' Steve made sure of it.

Properly optimized, a PC with a buffer size of 128 and a beefy processor and ram is screaming fast. Nobody I've ever recorded or had play through my system at 256 (properly tuned, of course) could feel or perceive any latency at all. Many cannot tell the difference between 512 and 256.

Guys, these are numbers that only tell part of the story. The real story here is this:

Inside the VSL software its 2.8ms from input to headphones on the Fastest setting @ 96k. If you set it up right for monitoring/recording 99.999% of the people on this planet cannot percieve latency.

That is an achievement of driver design that very few can claim. We've done it and its only going to get better and its features expanded upon.

Here's a great article on tuning Windows 7 for Audio:

Windows 7 Tuning Tips for audio processing

Using that as a guide, along with the normal things like turning off WiFi, Antivirus, NIC cards, etc AND disabling much of the junk that gets installed in Windows will net you a powerful, usable system worthy of production duties.

Cheers,

Jason