Just going to add this RE: reliability. Today CPUs are so powerful you don't need DSP systems anymore to do things like low latency tracking. It is still up to the user to manage latency by carefully selecting plugins, etc. With DSP based systems, the latency is generally fixed and extremely stable. I still use a very old PTHD system because it works great for recording audio :)
My 286 with a Voyetra Sequencer, which is still in use, is much more reliable then my modern PC in terms of tracking and timing.
You need a real time system, perfect task separation and _not_ an unreliable USB interface.
It has absolutely nothing to do with CPU power.
Also my Atari with Cubase 3.1 is much much better with MIDI timing then every modern PC setup.
Think about it. :-)
Just to be clear I'm talking about digital audio, not MIDI. I ran Cakewalk on my 386/486 as well, it worked great including SMPTE sync over to an analog tape machine
As a practical matter, the CPU has to deal with IO as well, I don't believe any 486 systems could handle this.
DSP based systems struggled a lot with IO in the late 90s until faster SATA drives became ubiquitous. Lots of them used SCSI or exotic hardware cards to deal with large track counts.
The first version of Ardour was written on a 25Mhz 486 and could record 24 tracks of 24bit 48kHz audio without breaking a sweat.
It did have a SCSI drive, but in 1999 I did not consider that "exotic", having been using them on various Unix workstations for more than a decade before that.
I used to use special FireWire extension card to have low latency, however I think this has been fixed in usb 3.0. the problem is when you have multitrack mixer that sends you many outputs all of them being different soundcards visible to the computer. Of course one guitar + VST will give you a little lag but you'll just push it back a little and it will do. Or will it?
