Fan Noise problem with ThinkPad R52?

ok, I guess if you say so then I can reply

If you don't use a mic when recording then the laptop fan noise is probably not going to bea problem, unless it's distracting or makes it harder for you to hear whatever it is that you want to record.

Most laptops are going to have some sort of fan noise. You can probably come up with something to muffle the sound, just don't obstruct airflow too much or it may overheat.

points to sig

the r52 uses same fan as r50

quiet,cool. see my review plz.

my t43p is very quiet and cool.

To be honest...

If you are just getting it to save space and you dont need the portability of the notebook, you could probably do better by getting a SFF desktop and LCD, less money and better in general most of the time. Obviously still do your homework though

And fan noise can make a difference even if you arent recording on a mic, though MAYBE not as much of one, it really depends on your setup. It can make a difference on mixdown, specificly your monitoring of it will be affected which can affect your mix. Of course if you are talking about mixing on closed headphones this isnt as big a deal, or cheaper computer speakers it probably wont make as much of a difference than high resolution monitors where you are listening for the imprefections to fix or redo.

Seablade

I use a PC desktop, laptop (Toshiba A70), and a Mac laptop (G4 titanium Powerbook) in my recording system. With the PC's, fan noise is almost always an issue with open-loop (microphone) recording. Depending on the type of mic you use, fan noise can ruin a perfectly good recording session. Of course, you can always set up a booth (ie a walk-in closet) for recoring voiceovers and vocals, but that is a huge hassle if you are the talent and the engineer.

I use the Powerbook for all of my open loop onsite recording because it has no fans - and therefore no noise. Granted, the PCs usually do a better job with loading up multiple virtual instruments, but I rely on the Mac for its low noise profile when audio recording (as opposed to midi). Any field recording I do on Minidisc just for sheer portability.

Budget on the 7200 rpm drive now with any system or latency will become a major drag for you. There's nothing like trying to lay down a vocal track on a piano line that is playing a half a second sooner in your headphones. One of the cheapest ways to go for the external drive for the laptop is to use an enclosure and install an IDE drive in it rather than something "out of the box" like a LaCie. The nice thing is that you can usually hotswap out your drives and use them for longterm storage, allowing you to store original tracks, not just WAV files - depending on your recording software. Also, I find that USB2 tends to be a faster connection than Firewire.

Just for clarification, the Mac definitly does have a fan, it is just much quieter than your average PC laptop fan.

PC desktops though you should have no problem getting nice and quiet, there are many different resources on this, even for systems that use fans instead of water cooling, check out Sound on Sound for some good stuff, I believe the recent issue had a decent article on this specificly.

And the drive does not have to do directly with the latency, that is much more your system, the sound card, the memory, processor, software, OS, how tuned it is etc...

The HD is more for track count than anything.

Hmm... There are quite a few things wrong in this chunk of text actually. Most recording programs store individual tracks AS uncompressed audio, maybe not a straight .wav file, maybe aiff, maybe bwf, but there is no reason really to reexport them as a .wav file as well on top of that as long as you are using the same sequencer throughout. Save your session and all its files on the drive and you should be fine.

Also if you are going the external HD route, ESPECIALLY with a powerbook, go with a FW800 HD, which blows away the USB drive, and is much better for audio(And video) work.

I tend to disagree with the thought that packaging your own HD is better, but that is generally because most of those enclosures are made to be as cheap as possible, in more ways than one, and show it half the time. YMMV on that though, especially depending on how good oyur enclosure is.

MD recording is portable, if you can though you may eventually want to step up in quality though, Tascam, Sound Devices, and others make decent units that owuld blow away the quality of the MD recorder. I have a amarantz that I think does better myself than most MDs that I have heard, however I wouldnt reccomend it that much without an external pre. Then again it really depends on what oyu are recording, I tend to be recording sound effects, and the range of volumes that I need to get range from little birds chirping in the morning, to explosions, but if you are just referring to recording some instruments at a concert with a 2 track off the baord, I suppose a MD could do the trick, though I am almost never happy with a 2 track recording myself from a live concert.

Seablade