My experience of a Studio Max, upgrading from an 11 y/o i7 iMac

[MajorFubar]

So my Mac Studio Max arrived yesterday. This is replacing an 11 year old 27" i7 iMac pegged at High Sierra. Have to say so far my experience has been...mixed. Though I'm hopeful everything will bed-in.

1) First of all, the HDMI output would not work with my Samsung LU28R55 4K monitor. Nothing. Totally dead. Tried it with two different known-good HDMI cables. Nothing but a blank screen with the monitor putting itself to sleep after 30 seconds. I got round this shall we say somewhat fundamental issue by rigging the Studio via USB-C to a 'borrowed-from-work' HP G5 docking station, then connecting that to the Samsung via DisplayPort. Have to say, this arrangement introduces way more cabling into the mix than I had hoped for, but I'm not prepared to buy another monitor to replace my nearly-new Samsung in the hope it randomly works. I have had no issues connecting the Samsung to either my 2010 MacMini nor to my son's 2013 MBP (both via HDMI), so obviously this is caused by an irreconcilable relationship-breakdown between the Samsung and the Studio, which are somehow being coaxed into talking to each other using the G5 as an arbitrator.

2) Speed. Just wow. Everything just loads and runs fast. Instantly fast. Even the OS gets to the desktop quicker than the monitor powers-on from sleep (though that might also be a result of how I've had to jerry-rig the monitor to the Studio via the HP G5 dock). Although I've been accustomed to using the Samsung SSD inside my 11 y/o iMac, this is on another level. Like, 'ten floors higher' level.

3) Monterey seems to have fundamentally broken iCloud Drive. Pretty much all my documents and work are on the iCloud, for which I pay for a 2TB of storage. But it's not sync'ing properly, even though I've turned everything on. When I try to force a subfolder inside the iCloud Drive to download, I just get an error message telling me to check my internet connection, even though the internet is provably working (YT/FB/Google/Mail etc all working). I'm going to have to find a way to manually copy 800GB+ of stuff over from my iMac manually. My iMac was backed up to an external HDD via TimeMachine, but my only attempt at trying to restore from it this morning, before going to work, had the computer wanting to create a new account, and I don't want to do that. After work I'll mess with it some more to see if I can get it to migrate my data. Otherwise, I'll have to do it a different way.

4) Picture quality on my 4K screen. Seems pretty sharp to me, compared to the mess some people warned me about. Maybe I'm just blind, or I "have grown accustomed to blurred text". Either way, I'm content with it.

5) Niche I know, but some basic functionalities in the current version of Logic 10.7 seem to have been broken compared to 10.4 I was using. For a start I couldn't get it to recognise my Icon Qcon Pro X and my three EX extenders as separate units: all four units mapped to the same first 8 tracks of a project, instead of to 32 different tracks. I finally got it to work, but more by luck than anything else. Very obviously, a bug in the current version of Logic, that wasn't there in 10.4 but no idea if it was present on any version inbetween.

6) Fan noise. Yes it's permanently on. No, at nearly 53 years old it really doesn't bother me. It's still so immeasurably quieter than the gronking hard drive in my iMac that it's not even nearly an issue. My own breathing makes more noise.

7) Not the computer's fault: I laughably had a go at streaming a 4K video from YT last night. Nothing special, just one of the channels I subscribe to about music production. Background: this is my first internet-connected device that can stream 4K. Let's just say that it didn't go well, and that live 4K streaming in my area is obviously an unachievable pipe-dream. It's nice to know the computer can do it though. But 1080P is obviously my ceiling for now.

I'll keep this updated with progress. For a few days at least.

 

[Random_Matt]

Excellent.

 

[w5jck]

You might as well compare the Studio to an Etch-&-Sketch as an 11 year old, worn out Mac running High Sierra. I just got a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Same thing, it makes my old 2012 Mac mini and 2014 MacBook Pro 15" look like antiques, but almost any new computer would too.

I am impressed with the MacBook Air M1, and Monterey is a quantum leap from the High Sierra and Mojave my old relics run, but the new Safari blows chunks and iCloud is a huge piece of poop now. The problem with iCloud is iCloud, not Monterey. iCloud is messing up syncing across all of my devices including an iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad mini 5, iPad Air 2020, and the Macs. Apple has morons for developers these days. I wish they would forgo the WWDC for at least two years and instead concentrate on cleaning up their OSes. Their hardware is great, but the OSes are terrible.

 

[headlessmike]

I got round this shall we say somewhat fundamental issue by rigging the Studio via USB-C to a 'borrowed-from-work' HP G5 docking station, then connecting that to the Samsung via DisplayPort.

You might want to try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable. It would let you skip the dock.

 

[Ethosik]

You might want to try a USB-C to DisplayPort cable. It would let you skip the dock.

This is what I use.

 

[MajorFubar]

Slight update: I think I've managed to kickstart the great iCloud Drive sync by forcing it to download one Logic file. Now says it's sync'ing 631GB, which is probably about 200GB less than I expect. I will let it carry on. It will take daaaaays to do this on my internet.

 

[bfChris2]

the HDMI output would not work with my Samsung LU28R55 4K monitor. Nothing. Totally dead. Tried it with two different known-good HDMI cables. Nothing but a blank screen with the monitor putting itself to sleep after 30 seconds. I got round this shall we say somewhat fundamental issue by rigging the Studio via USB-C to a 'borrowed-from-work' HP G5 docking station, then connecting that to the Samsung via DisplayPort. Have to say, this arrangement introduces way more cabling into the mix than I had hoped for, but I'm not prepared to buy another monitor to replace my nearly-new Samsung in the hope it randomly works. I have had no issues connecting the Samsung to either my 2010 MacMini nor to my son's 2013 MBP (both via HDMI), so obviously this is caused by an irreconcilable relationship-breakdown between the Samsung and the Studio, which are somehow being coaxed into talking to each other using the G5 as an arbitrator.

FWIW, I can say that at work in one of our edit suites just months before the Pandemic, when we hooked up our brand-new 2019 Mac Pro to the wall-mounted tv (producer monitor) via HDMI, there was no picture. The only way to get it work was to purchase an HDMI splitter, which wasn’t used as a splitter. The splitter simply served as an in-line dongle which performed a similar task to a “ground lifter” in the audio world: it broke the circuit in one of the pins—in this case, the HDCP, if I understand correctly.

Sadly, corporate greed saddled the HDMI interface with copy protection, and that has caused all the ills suffered by people trying to connect monitors to their computers. The result is that you can connect your computer to a monitor via HDMI, and (1) if it works, wonderful. (2) If it does not work, you can try that trick, but that would mean (should mean?) that that monitor can’t be used to watch any movies purchased from iTunes. Perhaps I’m wrong when I say the splitter interrupts the HDCP signal, but I do know that it interrupts some signal which Samsung and certain other manufacturers don’t like to see as input to their monitors. (3) If that doesn’t work, you have to get a different monitor or use DisplayPort or Thunderbolt.

 

[Ethosik]

FWIW, I can say that at work in one of our edit suites just months before the Pandemic, when we hooked up our brand-new 2019 Mac Pro to the wall-mounted tv (producer monitor) via HDMI, there was no picture. The only way to get it work was to purchase an HDMI splitter, which wasn’t used as a splitter. The splitter simply served as an in-line dongle which performed a similar task to a “ground lifter” in the audio world: it broke the circuit in one of the pins—in this case, the HDCP, if I understand correctly.

Sadly, corporate greed saddled the HDMI interface with copy protection, and that has caused all the ills suffered by people trying to connect monitors to their computers. The result is that you can connect your computer to a monitor via HDMI, and (1) if it works, wonderful. (2) If it does not work, you can try that trick, but that would mean (should mean?) that that monitor can’t be used to watch any movies purchased from iTunes. Perhaps I’m wrong when I say the splitter interrupts the HDCP signal, but I do know that it interrupts some signal which Samsung and certain other manufacturers don’t like to see as input to their monitors. (3) If that doesn’t work, you have to get a different monitor or use DisplayPort or Thunderbolt.

I find HDMI to be a lot of trouble. I experience similar problems on Windows systems. DisplayPort - even going from DIsplayPort to USB-C doesn't have the same problems I have been experiencing in the past. Not sure why. It can't be copy protection since I watch movies and TV shows through displayport. But HDMI is a frustrating connection it seems. I even couldn't get both PS4 and PS5 to work with a few known good HDMI cables.

 

[Fishrrman]

"I'm going to have to find a way to manually copy 800GB+ of stuff over from my iMac manually. My iMac was backed up to an external HDD via TimeMachine, but my only attempt at trying to restore from it this morning, before going to work, had the computer wanting to create a new account, and I don't want to do that. After work I'll mess with it some more to see if I can get it to migrate my data. Otherwise, I'll have to do it a different way."

This is what happens when you run the initial setup on a new Mac without using Setup Assistant to transfer your data. You end up with a "new" account that the Mac will see as "different from" your old account (even if username and password are the same). If you try copying files from the old Mac to the new one, you'll get "permissions problems".

How I would handle a "manual migration":
1. time machine WON'T WORK for "my method". You can't use it.
2. that means -- use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a cloned backup of the iMac. A cloned backup is mountable in the finder, like any other drive. Files/folders are "copy-able", like any other drive. (CCC and SD are FREE to download and use for 30 days, "doing things my way" won't cost you anything)
3. Connect cloned drive to the Studio
4. Now, take action to completely over-ride permissions:
a. mount drive icon on desktop
b. click ONE time on icon to select it
c. bring up get info box (command-i)
d. at bottom of get info, enter NEW password
e. put check into "ignore ownership on this volume" (sharing and permissions)
f. close get info.

Now you can copy files and folders from the backup to your NEW account, and whatever gets copied "comes under the ownership" of the NEW account.

BE CAREFUL when copying into the home folder.
BE AWARE that you CANNOT copy "the top level of folders" directly.
This means, you can't copy folders like "documents", "music", "movies", "pictures".
HOWEVER ... YOU CAN COPY stuff that is INSIDE OF these folders (both individual files and folders and their contents).

So, for instance, you could copy the "iTunes" folder from the backup to the Studio, replacing that folder (if it even exists). Or, you could copy the "Photos Library".

You can also copy things from home/library, but be careful and keep notes.

That's how I'd do it.

 

[MajorFubar]

FWIW, I can say that at work in one of our edit suites just months before the Pandemic, when we hooked up our brand-new 2019 Mac Pro to the wall-mounted tv (producer monitor) via HDMI, there was no picture. The only way to get it work was to purchase an HDMI splitter, which wasn’t used as a splitter. The splitter simply served as an in-line dongle which performed a similar task to a “ground lifter” in the audio world: it broke the circuit in one of the pins—in this case, the HDCP, if I understand correctly.

Sadly, corporate greed saddled the HDMI interface with copy protection, and that has caused all the ills suffered by people trying to connect monitors to their computers. The result is that you can connect your computer to a monitor via HDMI, and (1) if it works, wonderful. (2) If it does not work, you can try that trick, but that would mean (should mean?) that that monitor can’t be used to watch any movies purchased from iTunes. Perhaps I’m wrong when I say the splitter interrupts the HDCP signal, but I do know that it interrupts some signal which Samsung and certain other manufacturers don’t like to see as input to their monitors. (3) If that doesn’t work, you have to get a different monitor or use DisplayPort or Thunderbolt.

This is almost certainly my issue. I never gave it a thought.

 

[MajorFubar]

After a couple of days I've only 90GB left to copy. So the transfer is going well.

I've yet to suffer the joys of trying to get my fully-legal copy of Office 16 to work. I once had to restore my iMac from a Time Machine backup and it (Office) complained I had re-authorised it too many times. It took me an age to get round that problem and get everything working again. I Googled the problem and it was pretty well known with no definite one-fits-all answer. I don't condone software piracy but during that battle I could sympathise with those who had similar issues and who in the end had given up and downloaded a hacked copy.

 

[Fravin]

Perhaps I’m wrong when I say the splitter interrupts the HDCP signal, but I do know that it interrupts some signal which Samsung and certain other manufacturers don’t like to see as input to their monitors.

You are not. The splitter will break HDCP somehow. And you won't be able to play protected content through it.

As You said, HDMI is a bunch of different strategies put together. In old Blue-Ray days they tried to lock the player to the display. But you know, this is old tech mixed with new. The result is that.

Windows has a solution for this, pretty raw one. It bypasses the hardware HDCP connection, relaying in the GPU's software to do so.

 

[Fravin]

It took me an age to get round that problem and get everything working again.

Drop Microsoft a line. Simple like that.

 

[MajorFubar]

Drop Microsoft a line. Simple like that.

I think that's what I ended up doing in the end, quoting my licence number. It was a few years ago.

 

[MajorFubar]

So here we are three days in, and I think everything has finally downloaded. After those two quite significant initial scares of not being able to get the monitor to work then not being able to get my control surfaces to map properly to Logic because of a bug in the current version (not present in Logic 10.4 I wa previously brickwalled to) I think I'm there.

Have to admit I'm extremely tempted to keep my old Time Machine drive as a permanent backup of my old machine as at 08 April and buy a new 4TB drive for this. It would give me peace of mind that, if it turns out something hasn't sync'd via the cloud, I do have a physical backup to go back to.

I have a few Logic plugins tthat are not yet M1 coded, and I'll be very sad to lose those, but I knew that going in. One is by a pretty big name in music (Korg) so Im hoping in time they pull-out the stops and give us an M1 version.

 

[Fravin]

Very nice setup!

I have a few Logic plugins tthat are not yet M1 coded, and I'll be very sad to lose those, but I knew that going in. One is by a pretty big name in music (Korg) so Im hoping in time they pull-out the stops and give us an M1 version.

Do they run under Rosseta?

 

[MajorFubar]

Very nice setup!




Do they run under Rosseta?

Some do: For example Memory Moon's ME80 (the most authentic Yamaha CS80 emulator in the world) is happy to run under Rosetta, but the ironically-named Korg M1 emulator won't fire-up at all.

 

[spiderman0616]

Ok, that is one sexy setup you have there. I’m jealous.

 

[satcomer]

When you dropped Microsoft office look a donation ware LebraOffice and download the silicone version!

 

[MajorFubar]

When you dropped Microsoft office look a donation ware LebraOffice and download the silicone version!

Thanks for the tip.

 

[MajorFubar]

Ok, that is one sexy setup you have there. I’m jealous.

Thanks. Technically I've been building it over a period of years: buying things, p/x'ing them or selling them and buying the next step up. Pretty satisfied that I'm now the weakest link, so I won't be updating anything now until it's obsolete.

 

[satcomer]

Thanks. Technically I've been building it over a period of years: buying things, p/x'ing them or selling them and buying the next step up. Pretty satisfied that I'm now the weakest link, so I won't be updating anything now until it's obsolete.

If you serious about audio and getting your music out onto social networks then look the shareware loopBack and it you commerce in your steaming then loop at this digital cart machine program called Farrogo!

 

[MajorFubar]

My thoughts about the Studio fans...

I can't hear my Studio Max's fans running unless I put my best ear within 6" of the casing. So it's pretty accurate to say the sound is not a distraction for me. My 20 y/o sons, whom, as you would expect, have much better hearing than me, say they can faintly hear the fans when sat 18" from the computer at the regular seating position in my room, but that the sound is not a distraction.

What does worry me however is the fact the fans are constantly running. With my iMac, I didn't generally ever turn it off: not even at night. Only if I was going to be away from it for several days. I enabled all the power-saving options to put the HDD and screen to sleep after a certain time of inactivity, then I just left it.

But after day 1 of owning the Studio, I have started shutting it down at the end of every night and only powering it on when I come back from work the day after. My reasoning is there's a finite number of times those fans are going to rotate, and I don't see the point in unnecessarily shortening the time it takes for that limit to be reached, during hours when I'm not using the machine. Having the fans running constantly, needlessly recirculating cold air, seems totally at odds with Apple's power-efficiency sales-pitches. For the first time in 11 years of Mac ownership it seems likely I'll download some kind of fan-control and override the automatic settings completely.

 

[MajorFubar]

You might as well compare the Studio to an Etch-&-Sketch as an 11 year old, worn out Mac running High Sierra. I just got a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Same thing, it makes my old 2012 Mac mini and 2014 MacBook Pro 15" look like antiques, but almost any new computer would too.

I am impressed with the MacBook Air M1, and Monterey is a quantum leap from the High Sierra and Mojave my old relics run, but the new Safari blows chunks and iCloud is a huge piece of poop now. The problem with iCloud is iCloud, not Monterey. iCloud is messing up syncing across all of my devices including an iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad mini 5, iPad Air 2020, and the Macs. Apple has morons for developers these days. I wish they would forgo the WWDC for at least two years and instead concentrate on cleaning up their OSes. Their hardware is great, but the OSes are terrible.

Picking up on this rather late sorry, but figured I'd give it a few weeks of experience before I came back with my comments. Have to say, for many in-app activities, I don't find this new machine massively faster than my 2011 i7 quad-core iMac with a 250GB Samsung SSD and 16GB RAM, and which, without wanting to sound condescending, was almost certainly faster than your 2014 MBP and definitely your 2012 Mac Mini (so your experience of migrating to an M1 is going to be different to mine).

Bouncing Logic projects laden with a dozen virtual synths and effects takes roughly the same time as my iMac, even when using only Logic-native plugins which have all been optimised for M1. It's probably a bit faster, but not so much where I've said oh wow holly s___ look at that, how did I survive before this.

Loading WAV files into iZotope RX6 and running my usual workflow of Loudness normalise to -10dB LUFS with a peak of -0.2dB takes roughly the same time as it did on the iMac, though fair enough this is an Intel app being loaded through Rosetta. Again, it probably is a bit faster, but not so much where it's clearly noticeable without a timer.

Credit where credit is due, I have noticed an improvement of roughly 10-15% when rendering simple videos with a few titles and wipes through iMovie (I have no need for FCP).

Was it worth it? Definitely: I'm now running a supported system with enough spec-overhead to hopefully give me ten years of life from it, same as I got from my 2011 i7 iMac when I purchased it. But, gotta be honest, looking at my workflows, very little speed-wise has yet totally blown me away compared to what I was used to, other than how fast the machine boots and how fast it loads apps and saves files, all of which can be explained by the approx 10x faster R/W compared to the SSD in my i7 iMac. If anything, I have even more respect for my 11 y/o iMac than I had before, which was obviously such a total beast, irrespective of benchmarks that would suggest it would be completely annihilated by an M1 iPad.

 

[AltecX]

Picking up on this rather late........

It sounds like most of what you do is more memory and disk heavy than CPU if that is the case. And likely heavy 4K read/write, which is not a huge performance difference in modern NVMe over older SSD's. You'll see some jump when more of your work becomes native but based on what you've said it may not be a large jump, but a noticeable one.