2011 MBP 17 so far (mini review)...

[Khazul]

Whats you definition of 'lower latencies'?

Im using with with an RME UFX and NI Audio 8 DJ (both on USB 2). I normally run both at 128 samples at 44.1K.

Right now the UFX is running quite happily at 32 samples (a few tracks playing, one recording from external in).

48 is the minimum I run it on the PC (on FW400 or USB as its the lowest available setting) - 32 seems the practical mimimum for the MBP on USB2. 48 seeems like a useful pratical minimum to give you some room to record glitch free etc.

At 16 samples its prettty much breaking up, att 24 samples get the occasional glitch. Live CPUU use shoots up for 16/24 especially and down to something sensible by the time the buffer size is at 48 upwards.

32 is something I use for playing rhythms sometimes (v-drum or pads etc), but generally 48 is the lowest I use for keyboards etc. Not tried FW on the MBP yet as I tend to use FW800 port for a hard drive. Also use 48 for recording through guitar rig.

As I said about - 128 is what I use for general mixing and record even with large track/plugin counts - and for most people that probaly allready counts as low.

BTW - the above is using an external FW800 WD passport studio to record onto - not exactly the best thing to use. Eventually I might get a fast express card SSD (48/96GB) as a working project drive to stick in the card slot as the write speeds on them seem quite decent. The other option we have here now is simply recording directly on the UFX to a USB drive without it ever going near the computer - RME are just starting to alpha test this. For example, do this might be useful if we want to run guitar rig at very low latency (32 samples), and want the safety of off-computer dry recording.