New look at old, boring controversy

Posted by Randall Shinn
Mar 26, 2008 at 11:30 AM

Having just completed the switch from Windows to Mac, I found this discussion of the new Safari interesting. In 2006 Jeffrey Zeldman had a blog on Safari’s superior handling of fonts and CSS. http://www.zeldman.com/2006/11/27/safari-beats-firefox/ Another site has a discussion on Safari’s handling of color photographs http://www.flickr.com/photos/darknesis/1424292900/. (Safari uses color management, and, given Mac’s use in the design world, if you’ve set up your system with color management, that matters.)

In my case I purchased a Mac Pro primarily to assist me with composing orchestral works and operas, as well as to create virtual realizations of the orchestral sounds. So power and an efficient operating system were my main concern. To my surprise I discovered that OS X has its own audio system (core audio) built into the operating system. This was providing better results than I had been having with Windows XP, but the real surprise came when I realized that OS X came with its own format for handling virtual instruments. Windows typically uses VST for this purpose, so that if you create a virtual cello section, it is processed through VST (developed by Steinberg). All my scores were set up for VST, so when I discovered that I could also set them up to use OS X’s Audio Units (AU), I could do a direct comparison.

The short story is that AU simply blew VST away. All problems that I had had with loud climaxes for full orchestra overwhelming the system during playback simply disappeared. The sound was also better in other more subtle ways.

So one of the things that I have been discovering is that Apple’s efforts to control many aspects of the whole system (from the operating system, hardware, audio system, and so on down to encouraging the use of Cocoa in writing software) have real performance benefits. Frankly, I am still a bit stunned by the improvement over my high-performance XP PC (which goes into storage today).

Randall Shinn