I am so so tired of this
happening in my videos.
Hello welcome!
The most recent firmware
update was very much still in beta.
Oh this is the king b2
microphone by the way.
Everyone can tell there will be no
presale days are coming to and end.
It went away for like a month or two and
now it's magically back.
And I know you all are too.
This is caused by a couple things.
The first is DPC latency issues.
This is audio driver latency.
There's a lot of complex stuff with
drivers and background
processes and DPC latency spikes
mean that your system, regardless of the
speed of your system,
it's unable to keep up with
the audio processing for real time
playback of your audio.
And there's a bunch of different
optimizations you can try to do for this.
I've done them all, they've either made
it worse or just not helped.
And it just means you get the crackles,
the static, the pops,
the skips or whatever.
Or complete dropouts to the extent that
it got so bad that I
was constantly unplugging
and re-plugging my audio interfaces to
even get audio at all
after a certain point.
The second is an issue I'm having with
DaVinci Resolve on Windows
that I've had for a couple
years now across all machines.
Where even if there aren't the DPC
latency spikes in the
source audio that I recorded,
it's present in the final export.
And if you think it's annoying to hear
every once in a while
in a video, keep in mind,
everything I watch and listen to is
constantly doing that.
Hardware is mostly to blame here, the
resolve issue I've had
across a multitude of systems.
Everyone has it when they
push things to their limits.
But even when I don't do
that, I still have the issue.
It started with
upgrading to Threadripper 3000.
Just normal Threadripper happened from
time to time a lot more
than my previous systems,
which was Intel X299.
Intel generally seems to not have this
issue anywhere near as bad as AMD does.
But Threadripper 3000 started coming up
every once in a while.
Upgraded to Threadripper Pro and it got
significantly worse.
It was happening all the time.
I was fighting it constantly.
I had to switch audio interfaces, I had
to switch mixers, I
had to do all this stuff,
and it was still happening.
I tried every solution in the book that I
typically help other
people solve the problems
with.
There's some pretty straightforward
optimizations, like changing windows to
optimize for background
services, enabling message signal
interrupt mode for your graphics card.
These things made it worse.
Fast forward and then I upgraded to
Nvidia the RTX 4090 when that came out.
Now Nvidia has been making improvements
to their driver for 40
series to fix the issues
specifically caused
by RTX 40 series cards.
However, my issues
predate that and go beyond that.
It doesn't actually fix my overall issues
here, it just fixed
one specifically caused
by it.
But the stacking of these issues combined
with it just being a
Threadripper Pro issue
in the first place, between that and my
computer being noisy and
stuff, I've just given up.
It's disrupted so many of my videos over
the past couple years
combined with the fact
that it has brought my microphone review
and other audio product review process to
a screeching halt.
I have companies emailing me asking me
where the hell their
reviews are because I can't
record clean audio for anything.
So here's what I'm doing about it.
It's hard to believe a
whole ass computer is in here.
I haven't opened anything super fancy
from Apple in a long time.
Packaging is pretty solid.
This is pretty sick.
Oh my, oh, it's
significantly heavier than I imagined.
You get the computer
and a cord, power cord.
I genuinely don't think
they give you anything else.
They still include like a tiny bit of
paperwork, but basically
just enough to tell you that
they're not including paperwork.
Might be the biggest Apple stick, like
official included
Apple sticker I've seen.
Oh, this thing is so chunky.
This weighs significantly more than like
a big heavy gaming laptop.
Which is expected.
It's just for its size.
Like it weighs as much as
some full size desktops.
All right.
This is a pretty slick little machine.
There's not really much to say about it.
You got a big block of aluminum.
You've got four Thunderbolt four ports on
the back, 10 gig ethernet, which is nice.
It's going to be a
three prong power to USB.
I think these are going
to be 3.0, which is great.
I was worried it didn't have type A's,
one HDMI and a
headphone jack and power button.
And then on the front, we've got two more
Thunderbolts and an
SD card slot, which is
kind of funky, but hey.
Yeah, you really get nothing with it.
Like in some regards, this is very much
like buying a cinema
camera in that to really get
use out of it, the computer itself just
buying it isn't enough.
Like you have to get accessories to go
with it to use it with
basically anything else.
I will say as dumb of a
thing as it is to focus on.
This feels like a fancy power cable.
Like this almost like rubber toothed
toothed braided thing going on.
I've not seen
something quite like it before.
Regardless, you can't really use it out
of the box like this if
you don't have anything
to go with it.
So we do have some accessories here.
Starting with the small stuff, I did get
an extra three meter
Thunderbolt four cable because
I have some other stuff I might want to
connect over Thunderbolt.
So over a hundred bucks for a USB cable
feels ridiculous, but
they are actually the best
and navigating the Thunderbolt USB four
compatible cable space has been a
nightmare for certain
devices.
And then I grabbed they had this on sale
for like half off a few
weeks ago and I knew I
was making some sort of upgrade or would
at least use it for a
steam library for my test
benches or something.
The Crucial X8 they have a four terabyte
little USB NVMe SSD and
given the two terabytes in
this thing.
So we haven't really talked specs yet.
It went mostly maxed out,
which is not the max chip.
It's the M2 Ultra with the highest core
count for the graphics
card, neural engine and CPU,
which means it will have all the cores it
needs to process my
videos, my 3d rendering,
my Photoshop stuff,
like all at the same time.
I went with 128 gigs of RAM because the
jump to 192 was just too pricey for me.
I really wanted the max, especially
because I use 256 on my
main machine, but that's fine.
And then I dropped it down.
I was originally going to get a four
terabyte boot SSD because
I use four terabyte boots
on my main rigs, just because
I install a lot of programs.
You can't really move around your cache
or scratch drive
locations on Mac in the same
way you can on Windows or
your temporary locations.
I've tried before and some programs don't
even let you install to external drives.
And since there are no additional
internal drives, that
becomes a problem pretty quickly.
Very short sighted of Apple, in my
opinion, ran into tons of
issues with that on the M1
Mac Mini, as I talked about.
But it was going to be another six to
eighteen hundred dollars to
get a four terabyte upgrade,
which is insane,
especially given how cheap this was.
So figured super, super fast four
terabyte external drive,
especially given the issues
I've had with network first storage on
Mac being kind of an issue.
Give me a little bit
extra storage in here.
And then going with the whole cinema
camera analogy, I can't
actually connect all my displays
to this machine because it
only has one HDMI output.
And I've got three, at least three, I
might want four
monitors connected over here.
I don't know if I'll actually be able to
do it here, but I got a pluggable dock.
This is for the new
Thunderbolt 4 slash USB 4 standard.
I've had a couple other docs from
CalDigit and Elgato,
interestingly enough, that I used
on the Mac Mini before, but they were
super limited in what you could do.
Like my biggest issue with the dock with
the docks is they're
designed to just give you
the missing ports on a laptop and they're
not designed to give you more.
And given that Thunderbolt supports so
much, I've been very
frustrated with that whole
scene.
Well, this pluggable
dock gives you everything.
And so this will be pretty crucial to me
connecting everything I
want because six, well, I guess
eight USB ports is not enough and I need
more video outs and things like that.
I don't need the like networking and
stuff that this offers,
but again, they got to be
flexible for the laptops.
And this one does come with its own
Thunderbolt cable, which is nice.
I will probably have both the dock and
the Mac studio on my desk at this point.
Here's the dock itself, completely
different, like metal shade
from the probably protected
Mac space gray look.
But you've got SD and micro SD slots on
board, which is pretty cool.
10 gig USB, a USB 2.0
that's like for quick charging.
You've got a 98 watt USB
PD port if you want it.
Headset jack, combo jack,
power button on the front.
And then on the back,
you've got quad display outputs.
I don't know if I think you only get two
of these to actually
work because they're in
two different groups.
So I think these are just mirrored.
So display port and HDMI.
And I need, I'm going to run HDMI to my
main display over
there, which is an LG CX and
then display port to my
second and third display.
And then I'm just not going to worry
about the fourth HDR
output because I don't need
it on Mac.
And then you do have
ethernet if you want it.
Another USB 10 gig power delivery port.
I think that's the
uplink to the computer itself.
And then two more 10 gig USB type A ports
and two five gig type A ports.
10 gig ports aren't
really used by anything.
So I'm pretty stoked to
have all these together.
Like I said, I hope
it will do what I want.
Comes on a nice little stand.
If you want to stand it up, I don't think
I will because I'll
have this under my TV.
So I'll just kind of sit together.
Pretty little setup.
Super expensive.
Should be super powerful.
Now I'm nervous.
I've run into limitations before when I
tried out the Mac
mini, made a video on that.
A lot of this was due to the lower specs,
the lower storage RAM,
whatever that I hopefully
avoided here on the Mac studio.
I had to get the SSD because networking
first storage on Mac is a little funky.
There's a lot of macOS quirks.
I got to get used to.
I needed something that just works.
I'm hoping that's what this is.
This won't be the last you'll see of it.
We'll have lots of actual like side by
side comparison
benchmarks and things like that.
It's also isn't the
last I'll see of Windows.
I have a whole video that I shot and just
haven't finished because I can't record
the voiceover with clean audio yet on
upgrading my GlitchArt and
AIR and stuff side of the
desk to a new Threadripper rig with all
the expansion cards I
need and things like that.
And that's running Windows.
I still have my Windows rig probably
moved away so it can be
quieter that I'll remote
into for my video quality analysis
testing for recording AV1
at all because despite Apple
being a founding member of the Alliance
for Open Media, they
don't support AV1 encoding
on the Mac at the moment.
Windows is still a part of my life.
I'll still have Linux on
my laptops and my Cyberdex.
But I'm very nervous, but I'm
hoping this is a good change.
All of this is not me just swinging money
around because I can.
I can't.
This was super expensive.
EposVox.gg.
Pick up my OBS course
if you want to help out.
It's in service of making
more videos for you all.
My upload schedule has dramatically
slowed down in 2023.
Part of it is because
I have less work time.
But in having less work time, I have less
time to fight with issues like this.
To fight with a system that doesn't work,
I need something
that's always going to be
there and stable.
And so that's what this is in service of.
Making more content for you all.
I need to get more videos to you all.
I want to provide that value.
So this will also let me hopefully do a
Mac-focused OBS mini-course spinoff for
my definitive guide.
I had some requests for that.
I wasn't really able to do it with the
Mac Mini and just wasn't
able to fit it in within
the scope of the course.
I'm hoping it's the right choice.
It definitely clashes with my sense of
counterculture or something.
But at this point, Windows and Nvidia
aren't counterculture either.
They're just as bad as Apple.
So I'm hoping it works out.
Won't be the last you see of this.
We've got lots of testing coming soon.
Remember to be kind.
Rewind.
This is the fifth time I recorded this
due to completely
separate, unrelated issues.