Quiet Computers or Quiet PCs for Music Production

Hey, folks Jim from Slick Audio, how is everybody doing? Today we are talking today in 2021 about Quiet Computers or Quiet PCs. Specifically, let us just get into the various audio PCs. Laptops, rack mounts, Towers PCs or Desktop, and Micros or Minicomputers.

Why do I need a Quiet PC?

The need for silent computers and laptops. Fueling the desire of professionals who work in sound-sensitive environments, such as recording studios, music production companies, and offices. In order to achieve a perfect silence unattainable with regular PCs and laptops, manufacturers have been creating ultra-quiet computers and laptops with sophisticated engineering to minimize sound.

There are many considerations that go into making a quiet computer, including power consumption, noise from hard drives or fans, heat generation, etc. They took these considerations into account. By the manufacturers who design these PCs and laptops, to meet a variety of needs.

The use cases for ultra-quiet computers range from home audio production to professional audio recording studios. They provide a more immersive experience for those working in audio production because it has fewer distractions from other noises in the room.

Audio Recording Laptops

So, I will start with laptops. You are packing a lot of horsepower into a really thin, small, teeny tiny so-called light chassis. With that, you got to cool it off. I mean, these are electronic devices that get hot. So, there are fans on the laptop. The fans are going to be loud because they have to be small in order to fit inside the case. So, if you wind the computer up and start running it at high rpm, and high horsepower right then the fans are going to kick on. It’s inevitable they’re not dead quiet. There is no such thing as a dead-quiet laptop. Anybody who tells you there is, well, they are lying. That does not mean ours are loud, or anybody else is necessarily loud. Some are a little louder than others, depending on the video card that is in there. We downsize our video cards because it’s not gaming machines, it’s a true audio recording machines so, therefore. So anyway, there are fans. Shop Now.

Let’s talk about Rack Computer Systems.

Next, I am just going to move right on. Let us talk about racks. Rack systems we are cramming a lot into a small fairly 4u case. You can’t fit liquid coolers in those things. There are a couple of cases out there that we could buy that cost a bloody fortune. And uh, and we could end up with you know a case and potentially a liquid cooler honestly. From all the testing that I’ve done, it just doesn’t work well. It’s too restricted. You’ve got your sides restricted. They restrict your top and bottom inside of a rack and that leaves the front in the back.

If you could put the cooler you know flat along the front of the back, you can’t. It’s just not the way racks work, so that being said rack systems uh are air-cooled only. We use some of the best coolers made. And they are extremely quiet. The problem is we you know in a passive what they call passive cooler fan, right? A fan heat sinks passive cooler passive cooling system. We can’t cool off some of the real high horsepower components, like in our 4000 series computers. It’s just way too much heat to dissipate properly and get the performance that I expect out of our own machines. So that being the case, we no longer make a 4 series rack unit. We make the 2000 series rack units and they work phenomenally with the passive coolers in them. So that would be your k series processors. Shop Now.

Audio recording desktop computer 

If you will, let’s move along to towers my favorites. Just because you’ve got a lot of air, you got a lot of room, you’ve got a lot of sound-absorbing material that we have in it. So, they are very quiet. That doesn’t mean that it will never, ever, ever get noisy at all. If you start winding it up, you are going to get some air noise going from front to back from all you know from the fans that are in there. However, even when they’re running like crazy, it’s still fairly quiet um but when that thing calms down, you’re under the norm I’ll call it normal use. It’s very difficult to hear. You can hear it but it is very difficult to hear it here again. No such thing as a perfectly quiet right that’s the towers. Shop Now.

Micro Recording Computers

Now we make a micro our M591, which is uh out now the 11th gen microcomputer. So you know we’ve got a little 4×4 box. I’ll call it a puck if you will. But it’s not round, it’s square, and the thing is there is a fan in there. In our older machines, the CPUs did not run as hot because of the CPU difference. We could do passive cooling. But now it’s just it’s impossible.

We have i7s i5s in them and the fans will kick on to cool them. But mostly, our M591 is an extremely quiet machine.

We also have our new series that is going to be coming out as soon as the last of the parts come in. We’ve been waiting patiently for several months now. But it’s gonna be a micro tower, and that is our M1300 or sorry T1300 my bad. That’s going to be a wicked little machine that actually uses the same liquid cooling as the big guy does as the T2300, now the T2400. So, they are extremely quiet, not as quiet as the big towers, but darn stinking close. So that wraps up cooling.

Liquid Cooling

We have liquid cooling and passive cooling. We know we have passive cooling in all the machines except for the towers. The two sets of towers that have liquid cooling obviously are way quieter near dead quiet, but they’re not dead quiet no such thing. Again, anybody tells you that anything will be especially when you’re doing audio or video. And you’re starting to really work the machine. You’re going to have heat dissipation, you have to cool it off. So hope that helps everybody and we’ll talk to you all on another video another day. Cheers. Shop Now.