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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

#51

Post by renewiltord »

jzwinck wrote: post #44
fab1an wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?

People go to Broadway shows to see live performances, and music is a big part of it (in some shows, the biggest). You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.

Actually, what is the reason for that? If we had computer-linked humans act a scene, then record all of their interactions, and then have them perform that ten nights in a row as live marionettes replaying their original actions from the computer, is that worse or better?

Does the potential for failure and variation attract the audience? Or just the fact that the medium is much higher fidelity: stage actors are human, three dimensional, and no other medium can record all the subtleties of motion and expression just as well.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#52

Post by apendleton »

fab1an wrote: post #38
robbyt wrote: post #36

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It's absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, t…

It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?

I played in pit orchestras in high school and college, and it's surprising how much can change from show to show. Lots of songs have vamps (sets of four or eight bars you repeat over and over until something happens and it's time to go to the next bit), or holds, or other various other things where the conductor is paying attention to what's happening on stage to cue the musicians. You could probably rig something up in QLab or whatnot to maybe emulate that effect digitally, but it's never going to be "just hit play on the canned track."

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#53

Post by everyone »

cehrlich wrote: post #18
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…

I don't know about the present state, but certainly 10 years ago you would have had to be out of your mind to use anything but a Mac in an Audio setup that is used for important live performances - the Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX.

"Audio and MIDI stacks on Windows were a mess compared to those in OSX" What do you mean? That sounds like its harder to write drivers for soundcards for windows.. But the user is not going to be writing their own drivers.

Any user who needs to perform audio with any computer will need a soundcard in order to have any sort of decent quality, for #1 Decent quality inputs and outputs #2 The correct input and output types like XLR (or fibre optic or whatever) #3 Acceptable latency for live performance.

Soundcards are available for mac or windows, the makers provide drivers which deal with the "Audio and MIDI stacks". From a users perspective theyre both fine. After that, you care about the machines performance, CPU, how much RAM, how fast is the RAM, how fast is the SSD.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#54

Post by mehrdada »

Reason077 wrote: post #23
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)

I am a huge M1 fan but that statement is almost true, but not quite there yet. I have experimented with a number of prebuilt machines with AMD Ryzen 3600X/3700X, Intel i7-10700, and Apple M1. Those (esp 3700X) are often slightly ahead of M1 (esp in Rosetta) usually at slightly cheaper prices [often discounted too] compared to the base model Mac mini, admittedly at a much higher power consumption, noise, physical size. The delta increases quickly if you have to pay $200 more for only 8GB RAM (which is the max and sometimes the real bottleneck) and overpriced SSD. If you need Rosetta, you are still probably better off with a mid-range Ryzen PC, assuming you're not married to macOS.

I agree that it is at least super competitive on pricing with comparable compact HP/Dell/Lenovo 8-core desktops. This was surely not true before M1 (I'd say on the order of 2x improvement in mini price-performance).

I suspect this will remain true for a at least a little bit more since Ryzen 5xxx are beasts too, and once supply-demand gets more balanced, machine prices will likely come down at or slightly below Mac mini M1.

On the laptop side, however, M1 is glorious and way cheaper than performance-matching alternatives.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#55

Post by amatecha »

robbyt wrote: post #36

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It's absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, t…

Yeah, when I started out with the first Intel Core Mac Mini, I bounced down most of my effects-heavy tracks, though I did this pretty begrudgingly. Fortunately Logic has a great feature where you can "Freeze" a track to a "bounced"/rendered audio file -- if you want to make edits to the effects, you can un-Freeze, make your changes and re-Freeze. Only downside is, this takes up precious time when you're trying to be creative/productive. :)

These days everyone expects to be able to just layer on 8 effects on every track but.. that's a pretty recent luxury. Back when computers weren't really powerful enough out of the box to do stuff like that you could get dedicated DSP cards like Universal Audio's "UAD-1" PCI card, which let you use really high quality effects on your tracks without overloading your CPU. Now they have newer Thunderbolt/USB-based outboard stuff to do the same thing.

Regardless, most people in audio know you never buy the brand new hardware (especially when it's on a new processor architecture) and expect to be able to do everything as effectively before. It takes a while for all the third-party software vendors to update their stuff and make it run smoothly, assuming the software team is still in business or still working on that product. There's a ton of great stuff we'll never get new updates of. This is why you'll sometimes find pretty old computers in musicians' homes... There's still one cool granular synthesis app I can think of for Mac OS 8/9 (th0nk) which was never updated for anything newer, for example.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#56

Post by amatecha »

fab1an wrote: post #38
robbyt wrote: post #36

Programming has been my "day job" for a long time, but writing music has been my real passion. It's absolutely standard for electronic musicians to bounce tracks with computationally expensive plugins to static audio tracks while working. Otherwise, there is usually not enough CPU available to perform all the DSP for a complex song. (Additionally, bouncing tracks to audio gives more control over fades, cross-fades, t…

It's a little weird, especially since the musicians aren't visible to the audience - why would you play live?

If it's for theatre performance, I'm guessing subtle timing is important.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#57

Post by amatecha »

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…

Try 77gb of high-resolution audio with realtime DSP happening, I guess? That's just for a piano instrument. https://synthogy.com/index.php/products/software-products/iv...

To be fair most sample-based instruments are not so data-heavy, but the very best-sounding high-quality ones are. They usually include some degree of software processing to dynamically alter the sound to make it sound as realistic or organic (or whatever) as possible. That's before any post-processing effects are layered on, per-instrument.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#58

Post by mahkoh »

Wow so it turns out that Broadway (!) had really bad digital sound until Apple came out with its revolutionary new design. When you go to a show next year, you'll be able to hear the quality of the M1. And it will only get better with the M2, the M3, and the M4.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#59

Post by bayindirh »

renewiltord wrote: post #51
jzwinck wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People go to Broadway shows to see live performances, and music is a big part of it (in some shows, the biggest). You may say the audience won't know the difference. But word will get out. Audiences may not be willing to pay premium prices for prerecorded content.

Actually, what is the reason for that? If we had computer-linked humans act a scene, then record all of their interactions, and then have them perform that ten nights in a row as live marionettes replaying their original actions from the computer, is that worse or better? Does the potential for failure and variation attract the audience? Or just the fact that the medium is much higher fidelity: stage actors are human…

It's not the fidelity, it's the human factor.

An concert, a play, or any other live performance is much more than a single night, 2 hour performance. It's countless hours of practice, errors, emotional up & downs during the journey.

The performance one watches is the tip of the iceberg and the underlying depth is what amazes us as humans. The unmistakable performance or real-time and invisible improvisation during the show.

I used to played in a symphony orchestra. Even the slowest of classical pieces is a storm for the orchestra, if not for the spectators.

Re: The impact of Apple Silicon Macs on Broadway

#60

Post by hans1729 »

mahkoh wrote: post #58

Wow so it turns out that Broadway (!) had really bad digital sound until Apple came out with its revolutionary new design. When you go to a show next year, you'll be able to hear the quality of the M1. And it will only get better with the M2, the M3, and the M4.

This put a smile on my face, happy holidays
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