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Studio Ultra/Max - any music focused users have one yet?

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G4towersofpower

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Mar 28, 2022
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Any forum dwellers do pro level music making and got their hands on an Ultra or Max as yet? Benchmark tests are cool and look great and all that but wondered if anybody had real world use on any of the major DAWs and huge sessions? Or had seen any good music specific videos anywhere you could point me to.


I do pop production and mixing, sessions are often 200 tracks , 150 audio plus many Virtual Instruments often still running live and loads of plugins, i use ProTools on a macmini i7 2018 at the moment and it’s really at max buffer and pretty much it’s limits so looking at an upgrade.


also questioning if the Ultra is overkill for this when last years Max’s seem still amazing. The Ultra seems quicker to get over here (UK) than waiting for a Max studio with 64gb it seems.
 
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If you're on a Mac Mini, going to any Studio is gonna be insane!

Audio doesn't get spoken about too much in reviews or on here, but it's actually one of the areas that you can get more out of more cores.... I think we'll see a bigger difference in performance (i.e. how large a project you can run) between the Max and the Ultra than the photographers and video folk because our software scales really well with more cores.

I'm on a maxed out 12-core 3.46GHz 5,1 Mac Pro, 48GB Ram, NVMe SSD, Sapphire RX 580 8GB graphics - I know both the Max and Ultra are going to blow mine away in day to day use, but the jump from 115 tracks (my machine) to ~185 (Studio Max) in the Logic Benchmark isn't quite the jump I'm hoping for - not even 2x power. But Maybe I"m being crazy... yes, I know single thread speed is much higher. The Ultra goes up to ~343 or something like that... so 3x the power of my current machine. And I too run huge projects @ 24/96khz - but I use Logic. My projects are usually much bigger than most people's, although I don't tend to use a lot of VSTi/soft synths other than Kontakt and Maschine.

Unfortunately, I simply don't think I can afford the Ultra, so I might have to just go for the Max and then swap it for the M3 Max/Ultra in a few years... I'm pretty sure the Studio with the M1 Max is going to be amazing (for me).
 
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Sharky II said:
If you're on a Mac Mini, going to any Studio is gonna be insane!

Audio doesn't get spoken about too much in reviews or on here, but it's actually one of the areas that you can get more out of more cores.... I think we'll see a bigger difference in performance (i.e. how large a project you can run) than the photographers and video folk because our software scales really well with more cores.

I'm on a maxed out 12-core 3.4GHz 5,1 Mac Pro, 48GB Ram, NVMe SSD, Sapphire RX 580 8GB graphics - I know both the Max and Ultra are going to blow mine away in day to day use, but the jump from 115 tracks (my machine) to ~185 (Studio Max) in the Logic Benchmark isn't quite the jump I'm hoping for - not even 2x power. But Maybe I"m being crazy... yes, I know single thread speed is much higher. The Ultra goes up to ~343 or something like that... so 3x the power of my current machine. And I too run huge projects @ 24/96khz - but I use Logic. My projects are usually much bigger than most people's, although I don't tend to use a lot of VSTi/soft synths other than Kontakt and Maschine.

Unfortunately, I simply don't think I can afford the Ultra, so I might have to just go for the Max and then swap it for the M3 Max/Ultra in a few years... I'm pretty sure the Studio with the M1 Max is going to be amazing (for me).
Click to expand...

Same for me. I got the Studio M1 Max 10/32/32/2TB which is more than enough for my Pro Tools 30 ish tracks projects. Currently my 2017 iMac 5K with 24GB RAM handles them without issues until I bounce then it reaches 100% CPU use. However, Logic Pro X is definitely better than Pro Tools handling large projects more than 100 tracks.
 
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I'm quite confident in my new setup after a week or so of ruff mixing and tracking some vocals and guitars. M1 Max Studio has destroyed every task in Logic so far. Everything is great in Rosetta except maybe NI Komplete, which I don't use a ton but didn't feel very well M1 optimized in my testing. Arturia Collection seems fine. I don't count tracks but I think I rarely run over 50. I use lots of UAD, iZotope, Soundtoys, etc. plugins. Came over from a late 2012 27" iMac, which performed brilliantly for years though had been taking a long time to open projects in its last days.
 
Spitfire Audio's Dan Keen is using a 14" MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip that's also in the Mac Studio, with 64GB unified memory, 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 2TB SSD. Here's what he has to say about it:

A Music Producer’s Review | 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro​

Uploaded February 10th



This is the Gary Barlow video that he refers to during the review:

The Making of Ant and Dec's 'Limitless' Theme-Tune | Gary Barlow ft Dan Keen​

Uploaded March 12th

 
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Thank you all for the insights and looking forward to all the new units landing for everybody.

A great time for us studio people no doubt , it doesn’t seem so long ago I was spending £600 on just an Isolation cabinet for the racked G4 computers that had to be in the room! So I’m taking the recent Studio noise stories with a pinch of salt. I have done much vocal tracking with an i7 machine nearby and unless you are Billie E volume levels it hasn’t been a real world recording problem 3 metres away.

Sharky II I came from 5,1’s to the i7 mini and then thought “this i7 computer is super zippy compared to the rest”, whether that was OS, CPU or GPU or something that benchmarks aside didn’t really represent for my use - it's been my favourite working mac of maybe 10 i’ve had.

And I thought similarly about going for a Max level now to buy into Ultra further down the line - also given that we know delivery day there will be a lot of favourite plugins not even Rosetta ready. Protools just made the confirmed Rosetta leap so thats reassuring . I’ve done music on Macs since 2002 so also done the whole rebuilding and upgrading/repairing (is that a thing anymore!) of graphics cards, ram, the "Create Pro" cpu updates - so now it’s a bit -gulp- think ahead about expandability.

F-Train that “Making of" is a great video to demonstrate our world, thanks for that, and genre agnostic a good example of how a simple pop session can go from demo through production to a living multi-track session thats cpu hungry, maybe with more audio on top and eventually stemmed to audio - but you really need that flexibility to change everything with an artist or client to a late point in the process.

I think bigger picture for audio there’s always been the heavy cpu plugins but i’ve noticed I’ve only had cpu problems in the last year on the 32gb macmini i7 as good modern plugins like dyn one, gulfoss, soothe have appeared - currently these give you a CPU option, not just oversampling but “quality” etc , sensibly because a few can take your whole system out. Not specifically to these plugins being in any way at fault, but many other plugins demand more of the GPU and can create AAE errors than a couple of years ago it seems

I guess a trend will be these CPU options will be more built in to have a higher start point in the next gen post Silicon take up , just as you’ve had Native Instruments metal support cutting out cheesegraters on certain plugins.

Anyway, just shooting the breeze til I get one and then can do some show and tell myself, always good to hear real world chat, thanks x
 
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G4towersofpower said:
Any forum dwellers do pro level music making and got their hands on an Ultra or Max as yet? Benchmark tests are cool and look great and all that but wondered if anybody had real world use on any of the major DAWs and huge sessions? Or had seen any good music specific videos anywhere you could point me to.


I do pop production and mixing, sessions are often 200 tracks , 150 audio plus many Virtual Instruments often still running live and loads of plugins, i use ProTools on a macmini i7 2018 at the moment and it’s really at max buffer and pretty much it’s limits so looking at an upgrade.


also questioning if the Ultra is overkill for this when last years Max’s seem still amazing. The Ultra seems quicker to get over here (UK) than waiting for a Max studio with 64gb it seems.
Click to expand...
I don't do production but do upsampling with USB Dac's that uses filters that are demanding on the processor. I tried a 2018 Mac mini and got audio drop outs no matter what I did. There were complaints on music production software forums about the same when using USB interfaces.

Did they finally fix this or did you have to purchase on of those expensive Caldigit devices to fix the USB dropouts?

I just bought a Max processor studio and it is awesome for this with no dropouts.
 
G4towersofpower said:
F-Train that “Making of" is a great video to demonstrate our world, thanks for that, and genre agnostic a good example of how a simple pop session can go from demo through production to a living multi-track session thats cpu hungry, maybe with more audio on top and eventually stemmed to audio - but you really need that flexibility to change everything with an artist or client to a late point in the process.
Click to expand...

For people who are interested in this video (post # 6), the finished composition for the show is at 26:00.
 
Interesting comparison here. Logic mentioned @ 7min in, but I've included a screenshot below:


M1 Max 32GB RAM - 173 Tracks
M1 Ultra 64GB RAM - 315 Tracks
M1 Ultra 128GB RAM - 341 Tracks

Can the M1 Max really 'only' do 173 tracks in this benchmark? My maxed out 5,1 Mac Pro can do 115 so I'm a bit underwhelmed, which may be a bit silly. Very interesting stuff about the 128GB doing more.

Anyone able to confirm these numbers? He doesn't mention buffer settings, etc.
 

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He did mention the 10 cores of the MAX loading up limited Logic to 173 tracks, so does seem to be a CPU core issue more than a RAM issue (since doubling the Ultra's RAM did not make a massive difference in the number of tracks).
 
Well, yes, of course it's a CPU issue - Logic scales well with CPUs. But I've seen people claim 195 tracks on the M1 Max.

Often non-audio users don't have the correct settings, buffer size etc in Preferences, so looking for some confirmation.

I'd actually say that running 10% more tracks is a pretty massive difference - though I cannot see this paging out to disk by running a lot of plugins... this project is not RAM intensive, even at 300+ tracks.
 
I don't think that Max Yuryev knows anything about computers and music, let alone about Logic. Does anyone know what Logic Benchmark he's talking about?

There's an actual musician who's made two YouTube videos about how many instances of Kontakt he can run on his M1 Max MacBook Pro. However, this was before Native Instruments optimised Kontakt for M1 chips. He says that he's going to run the same kind of test again soon.

There was a thread here last week about a benchmark from Logic users in Germany, but there was quite a lot of confusion about how that benchmark works. There's also a thread about that benchmark on the English forum Logic Pro Help.
 
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I looked at their MBP 16" vs. 2019 Mac Pro review and it shows a similar value for the Max (181 tracks):

1648682659728.png



So looks like he is using the same benchmark. Whether it is an accurate benchmark...
 
I'm quite a bit more interested in the opinions of the professionals in the two videos in post #6. The fellow in the first video would have used his M1 Max MacBook Pro to do his share of the work on the music in the second video. That video shows plenty about what virtual instruments and plugins they were using. The final composition, which is the music for a weekly UK TV show, is at the 26 minute mark. There's a link to the composer's Wikipedia page if you aren't familiar with him.
 
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Sharky II said:
The whole point is that the test/benchmark is the same, with the same settings, not just random Logic tests. It's a relatively standard benchmark for Logic: https://music-prod.com/logic-pro-benchmarks/
Click to expand...

Standard?

The guy who made that "benchmark", and others that he's made up for specific DAWs, uses it to help sell his music courses. He made the "benchmark" that Yuryev used, and that you're talking about, for x86b Intel Macs. It isn't even current. He's superseded it with a new "test" for M1 Macs.

My reaction, when I listened to the one that you're talking about, was "Is this a joke?" I think that its main function is to assure beginners that their computer is good enough to take his courses.

The background is clear from his YouTube channel, which has a grand total of 4,000 subscribers :)

The German test that was discussed in a thread here last week is at least serious. The problem is that there needs to be some clarity about it.

As I said just above, I also think that the videos in post #6 are a lot more helpful than these YouTube "tests".
 
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Yes, standard. If you go to Logic forums, or Gearspace, that's the standard Logic test that people use to benchmark their systems.

I'm quite a bit more interested in the opinions of the professionals in the two videos in post #6.
Click to expand...

Good for you, I'm interested in the results of this test. Hopefully there is room on this forum for both.
 
Sharky II said:
Yes, standard. If you go to Logic forums, or Gearspace, that's the standard Logic test that people use to benchmark their systems.
Click to expand...

With all due respect, I don't think that anybody who knows Logic is using that test for anything except amusement. Not to mention that the guy who made it has essentially replaced it with a new test for M1 computers. He did that a year ago. I guess that the word hasn't gotten around :)
 
I've just bought a Mac Studio and I'm experiencing horrendous intermittent audio dropouts maybe 4ish times a minute (known problem for ages). I haven't tried the workarounds yet, but it's truly a deal breaker if I can't get it fixed.
 
There was an update to Logic Pro - 10.7.4 - which apparently optimises performance for the Studio (both Max and Ultra).

Has anyone noticed a noticeable/measurable increase in performance with the 10.7.4 update?
 
G4towersofpower said:
Any forum dwellers do pro level music making and got their hands on an Ultra or Max as yet? Benchmark tests are cool and look great and all that but wondered if anybody had real world use on any of the major DAWs and huge sessions? Or had seen any good music specific videos anywhere you could point me to.


I do pop production and mixing, sessions are often 200 tracks , 150 audio plus many Virtual Instruments often still running live and loads of plugins, i use ProTools on a macmini i7 2018 at the moment and it’s really at max buffer and pretty much it’s limits so looking at an upgrade.


also questioning if the Ultra is overkill for this when last years Max’s seem still amazing. The Ultra seems quicker to get over here (UK) than waiting for a Max studio with 64gb it seems.
Click to expand...
In another forum, one user got his Ultra to play back 304 audio tracks, each with 15 Space Designer plugins. That’s 4,560 convolution reverbs for goodness sake! (Native mode).

The Max and Ultra are beasts with performance scaling very well from one to the next.

In “that” Logic Pro benchmark test, my M1 Max MBP gets ~180 tracks, up from ~80 tracks on my 2013 8 core Mac Pro.

Good times for music production!
 
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