#Best mac for studio production pro#
#Best mac for studio production plus#

So in summary 128 tracks of heavily edited audio, 15 tracks of VIs, then an instance of channel strip, Dverb on every audio track and then as many instances of Eleven II until the session falls over.

#Best mac for studio production pro#

Then we inserted instances of the Eleven II plug-in into the audio tracks until Pro Tools stops playing and screams 'CPU Error.' So we could compare it with Mike's HDX1 Mac Pro 5,1 12 core machine his system has a voice limitation (HDX) and could not go above 15 additional instrument tracks before it ran out of voices, so we stuck with that session. Our Pro Tools Expert Mac Power Test Session has 128 audio tracks with audio that is edited every second, each with an instance of the Avid Channel Strip and D-Verb. You may use a different DAW, but to be blunt, Pro Tool is a fussy bugger, and if Pro Tools runs on a machine then you can be pretty sure anything else will run like a dream. We also spent £45 on the USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 adaptor as for the tests we have a Thunderbolt 2 chassis and drives.įor our stress test, we decided to use the Pro Tools Mac Power Test we use on all our machines.

Gigabit Ethernet port (configurable to 10Gb Ethernet) Thunderbolt 2, HDMI, DVI and VGA supported using adapters (sold separately)

#Best mac for studio production plus#

Total Price £1969 plus we paid the extra £99 for AppleCare+įour Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports with support for: Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet using RJ-45 connector) Not only have we tested this Mac mini 2018 on its own but benchmarked it against a Mac Pro Late 2013 and also a 12 Core Mac Pro 5,1 to give you a sense of the power under the hood of the Mac mini 2018.įor the review we purchased (Yes we paid for it) a Mac mini with the following configuration:ģ.2GHz 6‑core 8th‑generation Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz) There's some merit in other reviews and also in anecdotal evidence from forums and social media, but to be frank, the only way to get to the facts is to test it ourselves. We've been asked by many people to take a look at the Mac mini 2018 to see if the claims of it being 'awesome' or that the 'USB2 audio is broken' are true. However, using the terms entry-level and pro-audio in the same sentence can feel like an oxymoron.

What hasn't helped is that in the early days the Mac mini was sold as an entry-level machine, which helped many people with limited funds to get on the Apple Mac train. The Mac mini has an image problem, it's very small, which means a lot of people are going to write it off as a serious machine when it comes to audio production.