Need advice for an ultimate sound system PC.

Madmaxneo

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Feb 25, 2014
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A friend of mine has asked me to build an ultimate sound system PC for him.
Well, to be exact this PC would be used to develop, mix, and remix music using Avid Pro Tools amongst other software. He would also use it in his house to power his sound system, I assume to DJ his own parties.
He does have a midi device he wants to connect and he has mentioned wanting a sound card.
I was thinking the sound blaster AE-5.
He says his budget will be about $1500, I don't think he'll need that much. But I don't know that much about audio mixing systems to really get an idea of what he needs and how much it will cost.
So any advice on components for this idea would be helpful.
Thanks in advance!
 

ARICH5

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1500$ is cheap for a sound mixing pc. professional stuff can be as high as 5 - 7000$ the cpu's alone cost 1k. starting with a xeon or threadripper cpu and high core count that protools use your base cpu/mobo combo is 2 grand. then you have the 64-128 gb's of ddr4 ram it uses and thats another 2 grand. and i wont get started with the optane storage.

if i were you id do some research first into what you need first. fyi: internal sound cards arent used in mixing. you have the redundancy of preamps and postamps. then its bounced. its done external with DAC's and the DAW.

hope this helps. i tinker around with virtualdj and sonar x2 and it sounds like crap on my 1000$ pc.
 

Madmaxneo

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Feb 25, 2014
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I've done some audio mixing on my system and it sounds great but it is a higher end gaming PC. Though it is an x79 platform. Why would you need such a high end cpu and that much ram for audio mixing? The friend does what he has right now on an older laptop and from what he says it sounds pretty good except it takes forever to get things done. I figured he wouldn't need a sound card because he later explained to me that he has all the external equipment but needs a PC to do all the work.