Operation Manual

ABOUT AUDIO ON COMPUTERS
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Via an ASIO Driver
Most audio cards designed for serious music and audio use come with ASIO drivers.
• Using a card via an ASIO driver can give latency figures as low as 3ms.
•When you use ASIO, only one program at a time can access the card.
✪ More information about ASIO can be found on Steinberg Media Technol-
ogies’ web pages, www.steinberg.net.
Intel vs. Other Processors
When you run Reason under Windows, the clock speed of the processor is a major
factor determining how many devices you can use at the same time. However, there
are other factors that should be taken into account, and one important such factor is
“floating point arithmetic performance”.
All audio operations in Reason are done with floating point calculations (counting with
decimal numbers rather than with non-decimal numbers, integers) to ensure the high-
est possible audio quality. You can get high audio quality on an integer system too,
but floating point is effective and accurate when it is available.
Intel Pentium processors are fast at floating point mathematics. Some other lower
priced processor have taken shortcuts which reduce their performance in this partic-
ular aspect. This will have noticeable effect on the performance of the program. Our
advice is:
✪ If you plan to buy a computer specifically for Reason, you can play it safe
and choose an Intel processor. Alternatively, make sure you select a pro-
cessor that is renowned for high floating point arithmetic performance!
Mac Specific Information
Under Mac OS X, all communication with most audio hardware can be handled by the
internal built-in audio controller.
D Other options may be available as well, mainly for compatibility with all
possible hardware/software configurations.
Use these only when required.