What kind of computer do you use for reason?

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glass-puppy
Posts: 40
Joined: 08 Feb 2019

31 Jul 2020

What made you choose it?

If you were to go on the market for a new machine and you wanted performance and value, what would you get?

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motuscott
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Location: Contest Weiner

31 Jul 2020

Bought a refurbed 2019 macbook pro this year. Refurb cos I'm cheap, mac cos I'm too old to learn a new OS. Coming from a 2008 imac which wouldn't run Reason 11, I have no complaints.
Who’s using the royal plural now baby? 🧂

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MrFigg
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31 Jul 2020

In the past I've always built my own PCs. When my last one melted down I started looking for parts only to find that all the motherboards have stupid fancy flashing and fading LEDs and all the Chassis are red or rainbow colours. Damn gamers.
In any case, the little computer shop down the road had a sale and I got a Lenovo desktop for half price. Big SSD with space for another,12 USB ports and three outputs on the graphics card. Load of RAM. Quiet as hell. Totally ok.
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glass-puppy
Posts: 40
Joined: 08 Feb 2019

31 Jul 2020

motuscott wrote:
31 Jul 2020
Bought a refurbed 2019 macbook pro this year. Refurb cos I'm cheap, mac cos I'm too old to learn a new OS. Coming from a 2008 imac which wouldn't run Reason 11, I have no complaints.
How much did that cost you? Where did you get it?

glass-puppy
Posts: 40
Joined: 08 Feb 2019

31 Jul 2020

MrFigg wrote:
31 Jul 2020
In the past I've always built my own PCs. When my last one melted down I started looking for parts only to find that all the motherboards have stupid fancy flashing and fading LEDs and all the Chassis are red or rainbow colours. Damn gamers.
In any case, the little computer shop down the road had a sale and I got a Lenovo desktop for half price. Big SSD with space for another,12 USB ports and three outputs on the graphics card. Load of RAM. Quiet as hell. Totally ok.
Yeah the gamer aesthetic kinda bothers me too lol. I really prefer something understated and clean/plain for music production. Would you ever go the laptop route for a music studio? The other day I went to walmart and checked out the gamer laptops and the specs seemed like what I think I'd want in a reason machine. But I'm not sure, it's been many years since I've looked into computer specs etc so I'm just now kinda catching back up.
Last edited by glass-puppy on 31 Jul 2020, edited 2 times in total.

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DaveyG
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31 Jul 2020

Even if you prefer to build your own PC it's often cheaper to buy a ready-made one then add/change the disks, memory and/or gfx card.

Fact is, any modern PC will run any DAW with usable results. With slower PCs you just have to be a bit more disciplined with bouncing or freezing tracks but it's not really a hardship. My main PC is very fast with crazy amounts of disk space and memory. My laptop is old and slow but will still run Reason and Studio One and a useful number of plugins.

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MrFigg
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31 Jul 2020

glass-puppy wrote:
31 Jul 2020
MrFigg wrote:
31 Jul 2020
In the past I've always built my own PCs. When my last one melted down I started looking for parts only to find that all the motherboards have stupid fancy flashing and fading LEDs and all the Chassis are red or rainbow colours. Damn gamers.
In any case, the little computer shop down the road had a sale and I got a Lenovo desktop for half price. Big SSD with space for another,12 USB ports and three outputs on the graphics card. Load of RAM. Quiet as hell. Totally ok.
Yeah the gamer aesthetic kinda bothers me too lol. I really prefer something understated and clean/plain. Would you ever go the laptop route for a music studio?
Not personally. I don't like laptops.
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glass-puppy
Posts: 40
Joined: 08 Feb 2019

31 Jul 2020

MrFigg wrote:
31 Jul 2020
glass-puppy wrote:
31 Jul 2020


Yeah the gamer aesthetic kinda bothers me too lol. I really prefer something understated and clean/plain. Would you ever go the laptop route for a music studio?
Not personally. I don't like laptops.
Why?

Me personally I dont like small displays, so if have to use a laptop it has to be large... that's the only thing... well and sometimes I just dont want the keyboard being where I'd prefer to have a midi controller lol. I guess that's why i got a Keith mcmillen kboard since you can just plop that over the touchpad area and just use a wireless mouse.

glass-puppy
Posts: 40
Joined: 08 Feb 2019

31 Jul 2020

DaveyG wrote:
31 Jul 2020
Even if you prefer to build your own PC it's often cheaper to buy a ready-made one then add/change the disks, memory and/or gfx card.

Fact is, any modern PC will run any DAW with usable results. With slower PCs you just have to be a bit more disciplined with bouncing or freezing tracks but it's not really a hardship. My main PC is very fast with crazy amounts of disk space and memory. My laptop is old and slow but will still run Reason and Studio One and a useful number of plugins.
If you had a budget of around a grand, more or less.. what would you get for a daw only machine? And why?

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Oquasec
Posts: 2849
Joined: 05 Mar 2017

31 Jul 2020

Get any laptop with a score of 3000 & higher for radio ready stuff.
Producer/Programmer.
Reason, FLS and Cubase NFR user.

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ksniod
Posts: 125
Joined: 05 Jan 2019

31 Jul 2020

I use a 13'' MBP from 2012 :P

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MrFigg
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31 Jul 2020

glass-puppy wrote:
31 Jul 2020
MrFigg wrote:
31 Jul 2020


Not personally. I don't like laptops.
Why?

Me personally I dont like small displays, so if have to use a laptop it has to be large... that's the only thing... well and sometimes I just dont want the keyboard being where I'd prefer to have a midi controller lol. I guess that's why i got a Keith mcmillen kboard since you can just plop that over the touchpad area and just use a wireless mouse.
Small screen (single), crap keyboard, shit mouse pad, hard disk space, not enough USB ports. Even from a portability angle, taking it on holiday I'd have to use the on screen keyboard as well as taking my guitar and audio interface along. That in addition to the fact that I have no lack of space in my studio. Done!!!
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antic604
Posts: 1134
Joined: 02 Apr 2020

31 Jul 2020

My Lenovo Legion Y730 is 1+ year old and I got it because:
  • it has a 15'' 1080p screen, because Reason and lots of VSTs have issues with high-DPI screens, so 1080p is 'safer'; also it's 144Hz panel, so it's awesome for any software that doesn't have capped framerate (most DAWs, not Reason though)
  • it has a 25W 6-core / 12-thread 8th-gen i7 and because it's a gaming laptop it doesn't have throttling problems (can run comfortably at 3.7-3.8GHz) because of crappy cooling solution that has to fit in small & thin chassis; still, it looks pretty inconspiciuous and slim for a gaming laptop
  • it has lots of ports, good internal audio, good trackpad
  • it has 2 drives: 256GB SSD for applications and 1TB HDD for samples, sound packs, etc. user-expandable RAM (up to 32GB I believe) and still one extra slot for SSD
  • it was half the price of equivalently specced Macbook Pro, Dell XPS or Razer Blade
Last edited by antic604 on 31 Jul 2020, edited 1 time in total.
Music tech enthusiast.
DAW, VST & hardware hoarder.
My "music": https://soundcloud.com/antic604

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chimp_spanner
Posts: 2908
Joined: 06 Mar 2015

31 Jul 2020

2017 MBP, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD internal, 2TB SSD external for samples. It rips through almost anything I need to do right now. Only thing is the memory is capped at 16. It's higher on the later models. But for now anyway, it's working great!

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MrFigg
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31 Jul 2020

antic604 wrote:
31 Jul 2020
My Lenovo Legion Y730 is 1+ year old and I got it because:
  • it has a 15'' 1080p screen, because Reason and lots of VSTs have issues with high-DPI screens, so 1080p is 'safer'; also it's 144Hz panel, so it's awesome for any software that doesn't have capped framerate (most DAWs, not Reason though)
  • it has a 25W 6-core / 12-thread 8th-gen i7 and because it's a gaming laptop it doesn't have throttling problems (can run comfortably at 3.7-3.8GHz) because of crappy cooling solution that has to fit in small & thin chassis; still, it looks pretty inconspiciuous and slim for a gaming laptop
  • it has lots of ports, good internal audio, good trackpad
  • it has 2 drives: 256GB SSD for applications and 1TB HDD for samples, sound packs, etc. and user-expandable RAM
  • it was half the price of equivalently specced Macbook Pro, Dell XPS or Razer Blade
Hahaha. I seem to still be living in the days when top spec laptops had 256Mb RAM.
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gullum
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Location: Faroe Islands
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31 Jul 2020

iMac 21.5 late 2012 16 GB ram and 500 GB SSD HD
still, can handle all I need when making music but struggling a little when editing videos I will get a new one sometime in the not to distant future might even get a Windows machine

PhillipOrdonez
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31 Jul 2020

If you are set on a laptop, find the most serious looking gamer laptop you can find with the highest specs you can afford.

I got a legion laptop as well and it runs everything without issues due to the good quality processor, which, is really important to choose the right one, use cpubenchmark to compare processors and to with the highest score you can afford. Plus, I love that it does not look like a gaming machine at all; it looks good!

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motuscott
Posts: 3420
Joined: 16 Jan 2015
Location: Contest Weiner

31 Jul 2020

glass-puppy wrote:
31 Jul 2020
motuscott wrote:
31 Jul 2020
Bought a refurbed 2019 macbook pro this year. Refurb cos I'm cheap, mac cos I'm too old to learn a new OS. Coming from a 2008 imac which wouldn't run Reason 11, I have no complaints.
How much did that cost you? Where did you get it?
Got it from Apple here, https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/macbook-pro
$1360 plus a bunch of new connectors to reuse my home studio setup.
Who’s using the royal plural now baby? 🧂

avasopht
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Posts: 3931
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

31 Jul 2020

I've got an HP ENVY Notebook 15-ae065sa with these two modifications:
1. 8GB 16GB RAM
2. 1TB HDD 1TB SSD + 500GB SSD (M.2)

It's got a fairly decent GPU (GTX 980m), 15" 1080p screen, plus an HDMI out I use for the second screen.

That 1TB SSD houses my EWQL library and a handful of Refills.

Performance is good enough, and the on-board audio interface has much lower output latency than my Focusrite Scarlett Solo Mk1 (only discovered this last week).

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marcuswitt
Posts: 238
Joined: 17 Jan 2015

31 Jul 2020

since Tuesday this week: MBP 2019, 16”, i9 2.4 GHz, 32GB, 1TB SSD, 8GB GPU.

Before that new MBP has arrived this week, I used to run Reason 11 Suite on a vintage 2009 MBP 17” 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM and a retrofitted SSD under OS X 10.11.6, which was a very solid and reliable system… until the motherboard and the bigger of the two internal GPUs ‘died‘ last week. But I’m happy that I’ve got the new 16” MBP because it’s so much faster in many ways. Love it!

avasopht
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31 Jul 2020

marcuswitt wrote:
31 Jul 2020
since Tuesday this week: MBP 2019, 16”, i9 2.4 GHz, 32GB, 1TB SSD, 8GB GPU.
That's one fierce setup ;)

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mjxl
Posts: 600
Joined: 23 Nov 2018

31 Jul 2020

I use my crappy pc which I do everything on, it's pretty shitty by today's standards, but it does everything I want still. (somehow lol)

i5 2500 CPU (3.3ghz)
8GB RAM (2x4GB @1333Mhz)
2TB SSD (2x 1TB Crucial MX500)
GTX960 (4GB, MSI model)

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sublunar
Posts: 507
Joined: 27 Apr 2017

31 Jul 2020

Custom building a new PC is the most performant and best value option, assuming you can build a computer. Next value option is buying used machines on ebay or something, but you'll still probably need to know a thing or two about computers because the value is most evident when there's missing drives or OSes that you can easily take care of yourself.

My main production machine is a custom built desktop I threw together for $500 with specs equal to or better than $2000 machines on the market at the time.

My portable machine is a ~10 year old Dell e6520 laptop that I paid $50 for and it runs everything I throw at it. Granted I don't run a shit ton of RE's or plugins at a time but I've never had an issue with it.

enossified
Posts: 115
Joined: 15 Aug 2016

31 Jul 2020

2012 iMac 27", quad i5

Still runs great but it's slow compared to more modern Macs. In pure speed, the 2020 MacBook Air quad i3 I'm typing on right now is 50% faster according to benchmarks I ran.

I think Apple delivers in value in a few ways:

-- Really good displays

-- Reliable hardware, I've used Macs that went a decade without any service and were only retired because the OS could no longer be updated.

-- Requires less management by the user than a Windows machine

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antic604
Posts: 1134
Joined: 02 Apr 2020

31 Jul 2020

I'd love this one :o

Music tech enthusiast.
DAW, VST & hardware hoarder.
My "music": https://soundcloud.com/antic604

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