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The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

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Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#21

Post by consp »

gamblor956 wrote: post #13
sleavey wrote: post #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 constr…

Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.

Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#22

Post by Daho0n »

crooked-v wrote: post #12
walterbell wrote: post #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.

Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?

Mixer and speakers? Yes.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#23

Post by Reason077 »

sneak wrote: post #2

I'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…

> "Broadway shows could already have achieved the same increase-in-sound-quality-per-dollar by switching to cheaper hardware running Windows"

Mac Minis are relatively cheap. Not much different in cost to comparable, branded, ultra-small-form-factor PC hardware. (And now, with the M1, I don't think you'll find competitive PC hardware in the same price range and form factor at all)

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#24

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

walterbell wrote: post #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.

Production companies are ephemeral and tour multiple locations. Depending on the production they may require different sorts of equipment to accommodate different performance skills. It's totally unfeasible for a venue to stock a wide enough menu to satisfy a variety of productions, and likewise totally unfeasible for a production that shows up and has mere hours before showtime to adapt to someone else's instrument rigs beyond the basic necessities of PA. You can rent but it's often better to buy as cheap as you can to eliminate complexity and risk.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#25

Post by arvinsim »

consp wrote: post #21
gamblor956 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.

Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.

Yup, I am also not understanding the need for it to be a mac mini.

The new Apple Silicon chips might be a lot faster. But I am pretty sure that audio plugins take a long time to update.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#26

Post by sgtnoodle »

walterbell wrote: post #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.

This sort of "wasteful spending" tends to happen for big budget events for reliability reasons. You might be able to save $10k by reusing equipment from the last event or using a venue's equipment, but if the equipment cuts out mid-show, it will cost a lot more than $10k in missed opportunity.

I spent a week hanging out at Circuit of the Americas helping to run a solar car race, and asked about all the loose CAT6 bursting out of every wire conduit. The broadcasters run new cable for their equipment every Formula One race, hardwire it, then cut it loose and pack up. It's apparently cheaper to do that than to debug connection problems with existing cables, or risk losing a camera feed unexpectedly due to intermittent connections from failing connectors.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#27

Post by forgingahead »

crooked-v wrote: post #12
walterbell wrote: post #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.

Would you also find it surprising that each band that plays in a venue buys their own audio equipment?

This is commonplace in the US, less so elsewhere.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#29

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

gamblor956 wrote: post #13
sleavey wrote: post #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 constr…

Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.

Sample libraries are pretty efficient compared to digital synthesis VSTs. They really don't hit the processor nearly has hard.

But M1 designs that max out at 16GB don't have the memory to handle plenty of sample libraries, so I don't understand how a Mac Mini is supposed to be up to the job.

It's not just about raw cycles but about cached access to the samples. The biggest libraries can run up to 1TB and you'll probably have more than one. Obviously you don't keep everything in RAM at the same time, but even so - 16GB is a serious limitation for this kind of work.

And if you're using a computer instead of a synth rig you cannot afford to have problems, because any stuttering or glitching is painfully obvious and distracting in a live setting.

It also makes no business sense for a Broadway show that may be grossing $25m a year with a multi-year run to cut costs to the bone on its musical hardware. Considering the cost saving involved in replacing real players (for better or worse...) it makes far more sense to spend twice as much initially for a no-risk professional setup than to pinch pennies and risk glitches.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#30

Post by cik »

consp wrote: post #21
gamblor956 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sample libraries are usually WAVs or (non-MPC) encoded audio files. Mac Minis simply don't have the processing power to handle the DAWs, which are generally CPU-intensive and can be memory-intensive depending on the VSTs or plugins used.

Sounds like a macmini is a terrible choice for that job. Is there a hard osx requirement? It's not like they are really cheap.

It's not that there's a hard OSX requirement, but Mainstage (for live mixing) dominates this field. It's incredibly low latency, and there's really nothing as good for this specific use case. Combine Mainstage with on-demand sequencers like Doggiebox, and Apple really owns this market.
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