[n3mmr]

I'm in the process of deciding if I want to get a QA401 audio analyzer.
It depends a lot on what PC is required: I much prefer a fanless PC at all times.

Could a Minix Z83-4 fanless media player style pc manage?

[squarewave]

On my new-ish business class dell laptop CPU goes to 7% when my QA400 (the older unbalanced model) is capturing. But if I switch from 24/48ksps to 24/192ksps and increase the FFT window size to 65535, CPU goes to 20%.

My guess is yes it would work fine.

[abbey road d enfer]

I'm in the process of deciding if I want to get a QA401 audio analyzer.

I think you should read this thread
https://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=62070.0
Hint: ignore the stupid exchanges between arnyk and me, there is not much to learn there, except about human vanity.

It depends a lot on what PC is required: I much prefer a fanless PC at all times.

When I used my 401, it was with a pedestrian notebook; I don't think it ever was a hindrance.

[n3mmr]

I got an answer to a direct email question from Matt at QuantAsylum yesterday, and he thinks a Minix Z83-4 would do nicely, as would almost any PC with a few cores and 4G or more memory.
And this agrees, come to think if it, with my experience of Reaper with a dozen active plugins on an even tinier PC.
I never connected, but Reaper has plugins that run several fft processes in parallell and in real time at that. And I never had a problem with a Bay Trail cpu at 1 G and 4G memory.

[n3mmr]

Matt looked further into the question of pc perf needed for a 401:

https://quantasylum.com/blogs/news/low-cost-test-setups

As you can see in that blog entry: one of the z83xx based fanless pc:s with 4GB memory is more than enough.
Only thing that might get to be a problem is logging: you should have some cloud storage or similar available if you intend to keep a lot of logs.

Personally I'd plug in a fast usb stick or a TF memory card for such things.

Tiny keyboard, smallest monitor you can get and a fanless PC plus a QA401 will make a great instrument setup for audio work.

[mrclunk]

I just got one of these. Need to make an interface box for it now.

My old Dell E6230 i5 laptop is a bit too slow for it unfortunately. Time for an upgrade...

Has anyone tried running the software in a virtual machine. e.g Virtual box on mac?
I don't see why it wouldn't, but don't want to pay £100 for a Windows 10 licence to find out..

[squarewave]

My old Dell E6230 i5 laptop is a bit too slow for it unfortunately. Time for an upgrade...

An i5 is old? Define old? I used to run my QA400 on a Toshiba that is literally 10 y/o and it worked fine. Maybe you just need to re-install the OS and clean out the crud. Frequently those machines have a factory image on another partition. You just need to re-run setup.

[mrclunk]

It's 8 years old, I thought it would be plenty fast enough..

It has a clean install on it, maybe it's something i'm doing wrong in the software, i've only played with it a couple of times and the app lags out / hangs a lot.
I'll have another go and see.

I'd much rather run on a mac as all my other machines are. iPad would be the dream.

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