This "hopelessly outdated" Power Mac system can become a
digital audio workstation with all the capabilities most basic
users require.
The Digidesign
AudioMedia II NuBus card (also see Integrating Vintage Macs into a Home
Studio) is still a fine-sounding piece of equipment after all
these years. Yes, a TASCAM DA-30 DAT player sounds better. Yes,
several midrange and high-end 24-bit/96 kHz interfaces sound
better. But those all cost a lot more than the venerable AMII goes
for these days (about US$25 on eBay), and CDs
produced in the 80s and early 90s using this card don't sound any
more dated today than they did 15 years ago.
For someone with the bug for vintage Macs and the desire to
record audio, a workstation built around the AudioMedia II can be a
great, inexpensive choice. Today, we'll convert an unloved Power Macintosh 8100 into a powerful and
versatile tool to capture, manipulate, and prepare music.
The Requisite Hardware
We've already decided on a DigiDesign AudioMedia II NuBus sound
card. Any of the other DigiDesign ProTools NuBus interfaces would
also work, but setting them up could be more complicated.
AudioMedia II provides stereo input and output of sound in
16-bit depth at 44.1 kHz (CD) and 48 kHz (DAT) sampling rates.
Digital (coax S/PDIF) and analog (dual RCA jacks) input are
separate and cannot be used at the same time. The digital and
analog outputs are both active at all times and output the same
sound.
This card has a built-in Motorola DSP (Digital Signal Processor)
chip that we'll be almost completely ignoring - because our Power
Mac is faster and more capable. We'll be using the AudioMedia II,
because of its great signal/noise ratio and extremely high quality
analog-digital converters.
Now that we've chosen a NuBus card, we need a powerful NuBus
Macintosh for it to live in. Any of the Power Macintosh 7100 or 8100 models make
a good choice. Word on the street suggests that some may be better
than others: 80 MHz machines are preferred for their
40 MHz bus speed, and second-wave models (8100/100, 8100/110,
7100/80, and Radius System
81/110) come with an improved ROM SIMM.
If you have several NuBus Power Macs to choose from, by all
means pick the best one or even mix-n-match. Upgrade the ROM SIMM
or overclock the bus if you're able. But if you're stuck with the
Mac you've got, don't despair. These differences aren't important
unless you're tweaking for ultimate performance.
It's important to have a separate physical hard drive to hold
the audio data, and the speed of this drive is very important. I
use and recommend a hard drive with a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM.
Any reasonably modern 10K SCSI drive will be more than fast enough,
so choose whichever one you like. In a pinch, a 7200 RPM disk made
in the last five years or so will probably be okay as well.
eBay is a great place to look for deals on used high-performance
drives, as is the local computer "buy, sell, and trade" shop.
Whichever drive you choose, make sure it has a 68-pin SCSI
connector; 80-pin drives will be cheaper, but you'll have to use a
potentially expensive and unreliable adapter.
Your boot drive (the one with the System Folder) isn't
speed-critical; anything reliable is okay to boot from.
Enough RAM is very important. While you might be able to eke out
a few recordings with very little memory, RAM is cheap and not
worth struggling over. Try to get a few 32 MB SIMMs - or at least a
bunch of 16 MB ones. You'll thank yourself later.
Optional Cards You'll Want
A G3 upgrade card isn't really necessary to do 16 tracks on an
8100, but once you've tried one, you'll never go without. The
general feeling of system responsiveness is dramatically improved,
and you'll have access to many more realtime effects. The stock CPU
might lumber along with a filter or two, but even a slow G3 will
handle 16 tracks along with a dozen or more effects and still have
room to breathe.
Fortissimo G3 Warning
Prices for Sonnet Technologies G3 upgrades are very low on eBay
right now, and the cards themselves are plentiful. An important
caveat to watch for is the Fortissimo bus-doubling magic technology
used in 400 MHz and faster Sonnet cards. Numerous users have
reported gross incompatibilities between Fortissimo technology and
DigiDesign NuBus cards. For safety, stick with the 300 MHz and
slower Sonnet cards or the excellent NewerTech MaxPowr upgrades.
Sonnet briefly offered a G4 upgrade for NuBus
Macs, but I have never been able to test one in a digital audio
editing rig.
A NuBus Fast/Wide SCSI card, such as the FWB JackHammer or ATTO
SiliconExpress IV, can improve the speed and responsiveness while
editing.
Am I saying that a high-performance modern hard drive is
essential but a SCSI accelerator is optional? Yes, I am. When
playing back many tracks of audio, the raw MB/s transfer speed
isn't very critical, but the speed at which the drive can seek a
particular track is. In this application, hooking a modern 10,000
RPM hard drive to your Mac's slow internal SCSI bus makes
sense.
While adding a SCSI accelerator can't improve a drive's access
time, it can increase megabytes per second. With my 10,000 RPM hard
drive attached to the 8100's internal bus, I can do 16 tracks, but
there's a buffering delay of about 1.5 seconds between pressing
play and hearing sound.
When I attach the same drive to the JackHammer NuBus card, that
delay drops to about one-half second. The speed of disk-based
effects plugins is almost doubled, too. Adding a SCSI accelerator
improves the responsiveness of your system, but it's not strictly
necessary.
A high-end NuBus video card is often one of the first upgrades
to any vintage system. I don't recommend it for digital audio.
Here's why: When using the AudioMedia II NuBus card - and
especially in conjunction with a NuBus SCSI accelerator - the
NuBus' limited bandwidth is already getting hammered. Adding a
NuBus video card only increases the burden, and we're not doing
anything graphically intensive that requires a fancy video
card.
If you really need high resolution, PDS video pass-thru adapters
come with most G3 upgrades and let you keep your HPV card. If 832 x
624 is good enough for you (it is for me), I recommend using the
built-in video of the 7100 or 8100.
In back-to-back testing using motherboard video and a Radius
PrecisionColor Pro 8XJ NuBus card, I found the motherboard to have
a very slight advantage when doing multitrack audio. Not
only does it help save a little NuBus bandwidth, it also frees a
precious slot. How else can an AMII, JackHammer, and SampleCell all
fit inside an 8100?
More Expansion!
A SCSI CD-R or CD-RW drive will fit nicely in the Mac's internal
CD-ROM bay and take the place of the original 2x read-only drive
the 7100 or 8100 came with. Speeds available from older 50-pin SCSI
CD recorders are not amazing by today's standards; they top out at
about 6x.
When mastering audio CDs to send for production, it's best to
burn at the slowest possible speed to minimize the chance for
subtle, distorting errors. Many newer drives can't go slower than
8x or 12x, so that old "awfully slow" drive might actually be
better, since it will probably be able to burn at a poky but
accurate 1x speed. Your patience will be rewarded.
A MIDI interface, such as the Midiman Mini-MacMan or MOTU MIDI
TimePiece, can bring a greater degree of freedom to your
music-making than hard drive recording alone offers. Nearly any
music imaginable can be input on a MIDI keyboard and played back
through a choice of thousands of synthesized instruments. From
bongos to violins or even a nine-foot Steinway, many instruments
you don't own have their sounds on tap in sample libraries.
As a first step, your MIDI keyboard probably has a few hundred
instruments built-in, and several of these can be played back
simultaneously when the keyboard is under MIDI control from the
Macintosh. Even more flexibility is available from rack mounted
synthesizers or the DigiDesign
SampleCell II NuBus card, which can be used to make an
instrument from any sound clip you can record!
Make sure to reserve two spare audio tracks for all the synth
instruments in the final mixdown; they're generating their sounds
independently from the Macintosh and will need to be patched in at
the end. I believe this inconvenience is a small price to pay for
the flexibility of synthesizers and the joyous frugality of using a
vintage Mac workstation.
A small mixing board makes a great jumping-on point for sound
going to the AudioMedia II. Choosing one with built-in
preamplifiers and phantom power will allow use of any microphone
you can find. Having direct control over the sound before it enters
the Mac also makes getting those levels "just right" so much
easier. With an appropriate mixer in-between, you can plug an
electric guitar or Rhodes piano right into the Mac and rock out or
access that Hammond organ for your easy listening pleasure!
That's All for Now
Including my footnotes, I can feel 2,000 words coming up fast,
and we haven't even discussed software yet! There's lots of vintage
software available that's great for this Power Mac 7100 or 8100
with Mac OS 7.6.1. Some of it is commercial software that you'll
need to find used, but there's enough in the free-and-clear to put
together a working studio.
If you're using a PCI Power Mac with Mac OS 8.6 or newer, your
freeware choices are even broader.
Be sure to come back next time, when I'll touch on some of the
best free choices for both older and newer vintage systems, as well
as some reasonably priced commercial offerings.
Until then, may the sun shine positively on your vintage Mac
workstation! 
1. When these machines premiered
much fuss was made about the 7100/66 and its lackluster NuBus
performance. Apparently, the NuBus controller chip wants the system
bus speed to be an even multiple of the NuBus speed. Since 33
doesn't divide nicely by 10, the NuBus controller supposedly
doesn't work efficiently and performance suffers.
Also, when installing a G3 upgrade the bus speed
is multiplied to find the G3 speed, so an upgraded 7100/80 is
faster than an upgraded 8100/100. The daring may try overclocking
the 7100/66, 8100/100 and 8100/110 models to gain the benefits of
the 40 MHz bus.
2. In response to my previous
column about RAID performance on NuBus Macs, reader Alex Timbol
wrote me about this improved ROM SIMM. A bug in the first ROM
causes NuBus performance to be degraded; the bug was fixed in the
later ROM. I happen to have one ROM of each version, so I tested
them back to-back in my G3-upgraded 8100/80.
Megabytes per Second benchmarks on a
JackHammer-connected drive showed no improvement, but other tests
had better results. With the old ROM my 8100 would crash after
about 15 minutes of playing 24 looped tracks in Deck. With the
newer ROM, it's played for hours without a hitch - a difference
that means a lot.
Each version can be most easily identified by
the copyright date printed directly on the black computer chips
themselves. The older ROM version will say "(C) 1983-93 APPLE"
while the newer version reads "(C) 1983-94 APPLE".
3. If you have used a NuBus G4
upgrade for music or audio work, please email me and tell me about
the experience.
