New 27" iMac support 64GB!

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/ ... 4gb-of-ram

Can anyone take a guess at the polyphony that this system would support? Processor options are:

3.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz

or

4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz

Would I be able to run Doesberg or Goerlitz full surround? (OK not quite enough memory for the latter but you get my drift) Or do you need more than 4 cores for this and I need to continue to dream of a $5000+ Mac Pro?

(NO WINDOWS WARS HERE I concede that Windows is cheaper/better, please take as a given that this is a Mac thread)

[mdyde]

As a benchmark I just did a quick test of polyphony on my 2011 MacBook Pro, with the following results:

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Hauptwerk v4.2.1
OS X 10.10.5
MacBook Pro 8.3 (17-inch, late 2011)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2860QM CPU @ 2.50GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 42 Stepping 7.
Mac built-in audio output

Static polyphony measured with largest ('4GB+') polyphony testing organ: approx. 55 keys x 150 pipes/key = 8250.

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My very, very rough guess would be that you would probably get somewhere in the region of double that polyphony (i.e. a static polyphony around 16,000) with the latest iMac 4.0 GHz CPU, on the basis that it has a bit less than double the clock speed of mine, but it's also several generations newer (and so is likely to perform perhaps 20-40% better than mine if the clock speed was the same).

I would imagine that would be ample processing power for almost any current sample sets and it should almost certainly be ample for the sample sets you mention, based on Sonus Paradisi's stated requirements:

http://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/top-selection/goerlitz-sonnenorgel.html
http://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/top-selection/doesburg-martinikerk-walcker-organ.html

I don't know whether the polyphony figures Sonus Paradisi states are for 'static polyphony' or an actual polyphony limit setting for real-time playing, but either way I would think it should be sufficient, based on the numbers stated.

Thanks for the reply, Martin.

How much does having additional output channels affect polyphony requirements? For example, if a 6 channel set is cited as requiring 6000+ Polyphony, but I set up the four front channels to mix down into 2 different sets of speakers, does that make my polyphony requirements = (4 * 2) + 2 or something like 10,000? Or do output channels not work that way?

[mdyde]

How you route the audio output from Hauptwerk is unlikely to affect the polyphony requirements significantly (more than +/- 10% perhaps, since the audio interface's drivers may add some additional overheads).

The requirements that a sample set producer states for a 6-channel 'surround' set would already account for the fact that three times as many virtual (stereo) pipes would be sounding at once, compared to a basic stereo version of the same sample set.

There is some background information on estimating polyphony requirements in this document (linked to from the 'Support | Requirements' section of the main Hauptwerk website):

https://www.hauptwerk.com/clientuploads/documentation/PDF/HauptwerkBackgroundTechnicalInfoOnComputerHardware.pdf