SGI vs Sun

andrew.slater@phonetics.oxford.ac.uk
Tue, 25 Nov 1997 16:56:16 +0000

Mark writes:
>I would be very grateful if you could give me some advice on what
>compatibility problems might arise. Clearly the two machines have
>different audio hardware, but beyond that: are there particular libraries
>or graphics facilities we might use in a synthesis project that could
>create some incompatibilities between an SGI and a Sun?

Andrew Slater writes:
Hmm... We've not experienced any real nasties between SGI and our Sun
here - although most people tend to use the SGIs for audio work. (I
prefer the audio hardware on SGs; the two Sun LX machines I've used
both click when you open the audio port). Also, we use a SCSI dat drive
attached to one of our Indys to stream audio off DAT to disk; I'm not
aware of a way of doing this on a Sun. The audiocontrol panel on the Sun
is rather basic (but one could write something better).

Otherwise, waves/ESPS users seem happy enough on both platforms. Having said
that, we don't have anyone doing anything really fancy and moving
between the two platforms...

A couple of minor inconveniences that we live with: the default block
size for DAT on an SGI isn't supported in the version of Solaris we're
running. Anything that uses DGL on the SGI doesn't run on our LX (although
DGL support may well be in the latest Solaris).

It might be worth talking to Entropic directly; they can probably advise
you much better than I can!

Best of luck,

Andrew