Hi
I'm in the same 'audio boat' , and have pondered the same question: "Is the 2.7 actually faster in certain situations than the lower clocked quad?" (in my case the 2.2ghz quad). Audio is a complicated scenario , as there's so many different aspects. You listed a few audio apps that might have diverse requirements.
First, the quad is much more powerful 'in general', so that's solved. But what about 'real time'?. This is a very important requirement in audio as it involves latency. The good news is that these quad chips seem to be able to turbo boost to approximately the same freq as the 2.7GHZ duo, so in effect it's a win/win approach where you have the best of both worlds with these new quads. They have much more powerful multiprocessing, yet can shut down cores when not needed, and ramp up the freq for apps that don't need the other cores; I other words, if your running a latency sensitive app like Ableton, the quad can in effect, become like the faster duo by shutting down 2 or 3 cores and ramping up the clock to 3.3ghz (approximately the same as the duo). They say this actually works really well, and is not some temporary experiment that will be abandoned later. It works, and does what I just said (they say).
So why would anyone even want a Duo at this point, if they cost about the same? (which I believe these two do). Well the thermal requirements for the quad make it unsuitable for a lot of machines. If you put the quad in the 13" it would, in effect, only behave like a duo and never fire up it's other cores (hypothetically of course), but you get the picture.
My only question is: "Is there latency involved in the process of determining what cores to shut down and how to ramp up in the quad with turbo boost ". They answer to this is probably "Yes of course", but the duo does this also as it has the same turbo boost (I believe) , yet it starts off at a higher clock. But the fact that it 'starts' at 2.7ghz and the quad at 2.2ghz is sort of irrelevant if the turbo boost stage is engaged as the latency will be the same in either case.
I got most of this brilliant insight (cough cough) from the Anandtech review which everyone should read ( exceedingly good reviews from these guys BTW ). Anand on passing mentions that the 2.7GHZ 'might' be just a little faster as it can turbo boost faster? (this isn't a scientific analysis, but just a speculation, going probably on common sense, as if any of this has anything to do with commons sense. In other words, this is perhaps wrong). But all of this is moot without tests.
WE NEED TESTS!!!
