TSC Nashville Mac Clone

Paul White checks over TSC's latest Mac‑clone‑based music studio package and sees red.

You may wonder why I'm reviewing a computer, and a bright red one at that, in a music technology magazine, but I have two very good reasons. Firstly, Nashville is a Mac OS system optimised for music applications, and for the past few months we've dedicated so much coverage to PC system support that some readers might get the impression that we in some way endorse it as the computer of choice for music. The reality is that we dedicate so much space to PC support because PCs need that much support! Secondly, there's a tendency to think that Macs are much more expensive than PCs, but the price difference is far less than you might think, especially when you buy a bundled system like this one.

Single‑sourced systems are something I've always promoted, because if you buy all the equipment from one supplier, there's nobody for them to pass the buck to if something doesn't work. Despite all our warnings, we still get a large number of calls from buyers (mainly of PCs) who have spent a lot of money on a machine that apparently meets the specifications of their software and hardware, only to find that something doesn't work, because the processor is the wrong type, the BIOS is biased, the standard chip set isn't quite as standard as it should be, or the motherboard was assembled when there was a Y in the day. If the computer will run Microsoft Office, the vendor will proclaim it a working PC, and if you turn to the software or soundcard manufacturer, they will point out that this is exactly the same version of Q‑Magic‑Walk‑32 that is performing flawlessly on 100,000 other systems worldwide. To put it in technical terms, you are seriously stuffed!

Even if the hardware is working perfectly, you may still find it impossible to get your combination of components running until you've sat up for at least three nights scouring Martin Walker's PC articles to find the right check box to tick in the corner of some cryptically named driver extension buried five layers deep in an inscrutable Windows hierarchy, then hidden behind the bat in the Auto Exec file. To turn it back on, you have to learn DOS, use The Force to find your way around the keyboard when the screen inexplicably goes black, shake powdered rhino horn over the disk drive while wearing woad and a grass skirt, then tap the processor chip three times with a skull on a stick...

Now this doesn't mean that Macs don't have problems — I won't even re‑enter the argument by claiming that Mac problems are usually easier to sort out — but if you must make music on a computer, buying a Mac system with all the necessary software and hardware already installed should make the process as painless as possible, especially if you're moving up from an Atari, which owes more to the Mac interface than it does to Windows 95.

Less Strain To Nashville

The Nashville is not an Apple product but a clone manufactured in the UK by Computer Warehouse — those people who send out catalogues with the beaming face of what looks uncannily like a used car salesman cloned from past‑its‑sell‑by‑date Bob Monkhouse DNA in every page corner. The reason Nashville is being touted as a music system is that it comes complete with Korg's 1212 PCI digital I/O card and Steinberg's Cubase VST pre‑installed or, if you prefer it, Emagic's Logic Audio with Audiowerk8; you get dual internal hard drives so you can keep audio files separate from your applications (Mac‑speak for programs); there's a 16‑speed CD‑ROM drive and, for good measure, an integral CD‑ROM burner with Astarte's Toast CD‑ROM Pro software so you can make your own audio CDs and CD‑ROMs. With the current low cost of CD‑R blanks, this is also an excellent way to back up audio files after a project is finished. For more mundane tasks, you get a copy of Claris Works 4 (one of the friendlier suites of business software) and a copy of mTropolis multimedia software so you can create a really nice presentation for your bank manager next time you want to upgrade. The system comes complete with keyboard and mouse but, as with most computers, you have to buy the monitor separately.

Tower Of Power

At the heart of the Nashville system is the CPU tower powered by a 200MHz PowerPC 604e processor. Though this is no longer the fastest Mac system on the market, it's still very fast, and, to the best of my knowledge, the 604e is still the top‑of‑the‑line PowerPC processor. With 256K of level 2 cache and 2Mb of video SGRAM fitted as standard, the Nashville has five PCI slots, one of which is occupied by the Korg 1212 (or Audiowerk8) PCI card. There's inbuilt support for SVGA monitors up to 21 inches with no need for a Mac adaptor, but one omission that irritates me is the lack of a power outlet to feed the monitor. Most Macs have an EC socket to power the monitor, so that when you shut down the computer, the monitor is powered down at the same time. My own Power Computing clone also suffers from this thoughtless omission.

If you buy all the equipment from one supplier, there's nobody for them to pass the buck to if something doesn't work.

The maximum RAM this machine can accommodate is 160Mb — which doesn't break any records, but it's more than enough for any musical task I can think of right now. Out of the box, Nashville comes with 64Mb of RAM installed, which is about the same as the RAM in all my Macs added together! Hard disk space isn't in short supply either, with a Quantum Fireball 2.1Gb drive as the main drive and a second Quantum Fireball 3.2Gb drive available for the storage of audio files. While the Quantum Fireball 3.2Gb isn't exactly the fastest drive around any more, it seems quite happy delivering eight tracks of simultaneous audio, and there's enough space on the larger drive to hold around 10 track hours of 44.1kHz audio.

It may not have escaped your notice that the computer is red — very red. I can assure you that no matter how red it looks in the photograph, it seems much redder in real life, and the beige mouse and keyboard that come with it just serve to emphasise the magnitude of the redness. Apparently the red casework is a limited edition, and you may be relieved to know that a standard beige version is available as an alternative.

The total cost of this package is £3171, and on top of that you need a monitor — ideally a 17‑inch model or larger. Around £3500 should buy you a complete system with a decent‑sized monitor. If that seems a lot of money, it's about the same as I originally paid for my Mac SE30 around 10 years ago, when I was earning around half what I do now. The SE30 had a built‑in 9‑inch mono screen, a 40Mb hard drive, and 4Mb of RAM, and could just about beat an Atari ST on speed from a standing start. At the time, a 1Gb hard drive cost around £4000. Three and a half grand may seem like a lot of money to shell out in one hit, but you really do get a very comprehensive music recording system that needs only a MIDI interface, a synth or two and a monitoring system to complete the picture. You'll also need a mic and a mic preamp of some kind for traditional audio recording, but with Nashville you can take your music all the way from original idea to finished CD. When you take away the cost of the software, the Korg card and the hard drives, the computer is virtually free — so how well does this bargain system stand up to its claim of being an out‑of‑the‑box music solution?

Open The Box

It doesn't take more than five minutes to unpack everything and plug in the relevant cables, and a nice touch is the inclusion of a Computer Warehouse Getting Started handbook to guide the unfamiliar through the ritual of getting a Mac going for the first time. Pressing the keyboard start button elicits the familiar musical chime and within a short space of time, the screen is alive with — TSC advertising graphics. Once loading is complete, you see a TSC logo in a window, which you need to close manually to get rid of, and the grey screen background is tastefully embossed with a matrix of CW logos. All this can be changed later if you don't like it.

All the software is pre‑installed and there are complete sets of disks and manuals for Cubase VST, Toast, and the Korg 1212 card, as well as breakout leads for the card. However, the business and presentation software has no master disks and no manuals, so you'll need to back it up yourself, and rely on the on‑line help to figure out how to work it. More seriously, I couldn't find a system software disk, but this must surely be an oversight [TSC say yes, it was], as all the other clones I've had from CW/TSC have come with operating system CD‑ROMs. There were also no spec or other details for the CD‑ROM drive or CD burner, and it's important to know the details for the latter if you intend to use it with different software, as not all drives are equally well supported. It would also be nice to know how fast it can read and write without having to refer back to the ad, which reveals the burner unit as a Sony mechanism capable of double‑speed burning and up to 12x reading, and the regular CD‑ROM drive as being a nippy 16x drive. Come to think of it, they don't even tell you which of the two slots is the regular CD‑ROM drive and which the CD burner. I discovered that the lower slot is the CD burner and requires a caddy for disk insertion (I thought caddies went out with double‑speed CD‑ROM drives?). Why am I not surprised that a caddy wasn't included! [TSC tell me it should have been.]

You get a very comprehensive music recording system that needs only a MIDI interface, a synth or two and a monitoring system to complete the picture.

This habit of not including master disks and proper information with bundled software is very irritating and should be clearly stated in the ads. Some of the software is password‑protected, so don't throw away all the bits of paper that come in the accessories box, otherwise you might discard the magic numbers that let you access your software for the first time. On a more positive note, there is a copy of the excellent book Mac OS 7.6 For Dummies included in the kit and I intend to read it thoroughly before this computer goes back to TSC.

Cubase VST is provided on CD‑ROM, but to guard against illicit copying, you still have to authorise your hard drive to run the program from a master floppy disk. I really hate disk‑based installs as it's too easy to lose an install or damage the disk, but I concede that manufacturers have to protect their rights some way.

Functionally the system works fine, and I'm pleased to report that the fan and hard‑drive noise is lower than on most Mac clones. You still wouldn't record vocals sitting at the keyboard, but you might get away with it if you stand at the other side of the room. The mouse that comes with the system has two buttons, which is confusing for a Mac user, who generally only has a single rodential appendage to deal with. In fact it works out rather well as the right button is configured as a click and hold function, so you don't have to keep holding the button down when exploring menus or dragging things. Clicking again 'unholds' the mouse.

I checked out the CD‑ROM burner, which works perfectly well (I happened to have a caddy for one of my own antique drives), if a little slowly at only double speed. However, to get one bundled in as part of such an attractively priced system is still impressive, so it would be churlish to moan. Toast can be used to create CD‑ROM backups of material stored on the hard drive, and also to compile audio CDs where the individual tracks have been saved as AIFF or SDII files. However, it compiles in track‑at‑once rather than disk‑at‑once mode, so the finished result, though perfectly playable on a regular CD player, is not ideal for use as a PQ‑coded master for CD production. Some disc pressing companies apparently have software that will allow them to duplicate from these disks, but unless the duplicators are specifically equipped to deal with them, the switching on and off of the laser between tracks may cause errors that are audible on the final pressing as clicks. The manufacturers of Toast should have a new package called Jam available shortly, and this will provide a better set of dedicated audio CD tools for making PQ‑encoded masters. We'll be featuring a spread on Jam as soon as it lands on our table.

Summary

It's not my intention to cover the software or hardware bundled with the Nashville, as all the musically relevant elements have been covered in depth in SOS in recent months. (For a full review of Cubase VST for the Mac, see the July '96 SOS. Korg's 1212 card was scrutinised in our July '97 issue; Toast last popped up in Mike Collins' article on burning your own CDs in March '97.) The real question is whether the Nashville is a practical desktop audio system, whether it's good value, and whether it is as complete as it might at first appear to be. On the whole, it creates a very good impression, though I'm not sure I could live with the red version. A couple of the bundled components, such as the CD‑R drive and the Quantum Fireball 3.2Gb drive, are a little long in the tooth, and consequently not quite as nimble as more up‑to‑date components, but they still do the job in hand admirably well. Everything comes properly installed and ready to run (though you have to authorise the software on first running it), and my only gripes are the lack of a CD caddy, the absence of master disks and manuals for the office/multimedia software, and the need for a little more in the way of general system information.

I feel that some care has been taken to keep the system reasonably quiet, the basic computer is very powerful, and all the music‑related accessories are thoughtfully chosen. Having the option of Logic Audio and Audiowerk8 is also sensible, as the imminent Logic Audio 3.0 offers a similar virtual studio environment to Cubase VST, complete with effects and signal processing. ADAT users will also be glad of the 1212's ADAT interface, though everyone else will have to make do with routing everything via a single stereo output. If you haven't already been sold down the PC route by the argument 'Well, I'll be able to play games on it too' (and see how long your system keeps working if you do!), the Nashville goes a long way towards equipping the desktop studio at a very competitive price.