The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
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The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
1–10 of 294 posts
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#2I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints.
This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change the author makes it out to be.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#3Is all the software necessary to pull this off already compiled for arm64?
I've read claims that rosetta 2 is fast. I haven't seen results about m1 running x86_64 through rosetta vs intel though.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#4I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change…
Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#5I'm sure that that market segment tends towards macs, but given these constraints I'm surprised that they're not using much cheaper PCs to run the same audio suites, given the budget constraints. This is to suggest that Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows, and that the M1 introduction isn't really the big sea change…
Many professional audio software suites have historically only run on macOS. I think that’s started to change over the past 5 years. But moving from macOS to Windows is a big, big effort for most orgs.
Ableton Live, the only one used for live performance by any of my circles (admittedly, in the electronic music scene, not Broadway) is cross-platform.
Logic Pro is, of course, Mac-only as it's made by Apple.
We're not talking about an organization moving to Windows here, we're just talking about a single, appliance-like keyboard-input-to-audio-output computer for someone to play music on in a live Broadway show. TFA writes about buying the machine new for that single purpose. There aren't really "switching costs" in the traditional sense in that circumstance.
TBH I think it's just an ad. The circumstance (we have to buy two brand new computers for every run of a show!) and claimed impact are just too contrived.
EDIT: Further supporting the idea that it's just an ad, every other post from this domain on HN is promoting a product.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#6> Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not.
It's a bit surprising that each show in the same theatre buys their own audio equipment.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#7I can’t be the only one to misread the title as “Broadwell”, and scratching my head extra hard at the reverse timeline (Broadwell was an Intel design produced from ~2014-2108)
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#8> Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constraints.
What is the complexity with sample libraries? Until now I thought they were just big collections of categorised MP3s, and surely Mac Minis can handle those. I guess I'm missing something.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#9> Some shows I’ve worked at set aside a $10,000-$12,000 budget for two keyboard rigs. That sounds like a lot of money at first, but it’s not.
> Apple Silicon changes everything for Broadway electronic music designers. The new M1 Mac mini is capable of running high-end sample libraries and virtual instruments in a stable manner, and it’s only going to get better with M2, M3, and M4-series chips in the future. The performance per dollar characteristics of Apple Silicon machines are going to have a huge impact on Broadway’s sound, and I’m very excited to see, or hear, what happens.
What will happen is probably that your budget will get reduced, since you don't need as much to deliver the same quality as today.
Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway
#10> Due to budget constraints, many shows end up using Mac minis. Historically speaking, the Mac mini’s computing power has been a bottleneck for electronic music designers on Broadway. In a perfect world, we’d all like to use the best-sounding sample libraries for our work, but that was never feasible with the Mac mini. Thus, the compromise was always to reduce sound quality to fit within the Mac mini’s compute constr…
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