| We're expanding our facilities and were considering getting
 | an SGI workstation for, among other things, running CSound.
 | However, I was wondering if anybody here could inform me
 | about what hardware/software combinations they were using
 | for audio I/O. We would love to have balanced lines for
 | analog I/O and also AES/EBU, preferably four-channel or
 | more. The idea is running the workstation directly to a
 | mixer/amp as part of an interconnecting set of sound
 | design/composition workstations. Am I asking for something
 | impractical or inexistent? We were considering the new O2
 | or maybe even an Octane computer...

get an ordinary O2 or Octane with ADAT card.  This gives you 8 channels
ADAT, plus stereo AES/EBU, which you can route to whatever digital
equipment you want to.  Doug Cook's audio page has all the info on
both, the machine and the card, at

   http://reality.sgi.com/employees/cook/audio.apps/

The machines have stereo analog I/O, but it seems you are better off
with digital for your purposes.

Re software: I just tried the new SGI compilers on csound (vers. 3.46)
and got a good 30% performance improvement so far.  Ill post my benchmarks
set in the near future.


Hope this helps,


-Tobias


-- 

______________________________________________________________________

Tobias Kunze                       t@kunze.stanford.edu
CCRMA, Stanford University         http://www.stanford.edu/~tkunze