Laptop for speaker calcs?

[tackleberry]

Can anyone suggest a reasonable laptop for speaker software? I have no experience in this area. My wife has a thinkpad for work, would one of these be any good?

 

[Tony_J]

Can anyone suggest a reasonable laptop for speaker software? I have no experience in this area. My wife has a thinkpad for work, would one of these be any good?

Should be fine - I've used Basta! and Hornresp on various machines - they don't need anything special.

 

[audio_PHIL_e]

I use a thinkpad for work, it has loads of memory and a number of cpu cores. A fair bit of my work involves running Linux in Virtual Machines which I'm sure is hungry for a bit of compute power, and Windoze manages it reasonably well. Are you worried about how long it would take to do lots of floating-point calculations?

 

[tackleberry]

To be honest I’ve no idea where to start yet. I want to create my own speaker designs.

I have very limited knowledge of computers, but been looking at Tutorials on YouTube for various types of software to get me into it.. I imagine a lot more questions once I get it!!

 

[HoopsOnToast]

I think Hornresp, Boxsim, WinISD etc will all work on pretty much anything these days. I use Unibox excel spreadsheet for speaker cabinet designs which being excel based again, will run on anything too.

A larger screen does help, say when doing measurements but I find a good balance of portablity and size helps if you are moving around, say from the garage/workshop to Living room etc when doing measurements, CAD, modelling etc.

Even if its an older machine, make sure it has a good battery as in the past I have found the PSU can interfere with mic measurements, especially odd noise, so being able to run off a battery (including for outside measurements) really helps.
A lot of new machines dont have USB type A interfaces, with a lot being the newer USB-C, so things like USB microphones, soundcards etc may need an adapter, and I've found issues with some hubs, plugging say a Mic and Analogue interface into the same hub.

 

[audio_PHIL_e]

I want to create my own speaker designs.

Seems like you need memory, and compute power for floating point operations as you are likely to be running mathematical models. Several "cores " could be an advantage if the software is written to optimise doing things in parallel (if it isn't then you could end up spending money to no real advantage). I'd advise finding which software you want to run, then getting the machine best suited to running it. The software vendors may give you some guidance on this. Beware of computer salesmen who will sell you the highest spec machine for running computer games when that may not be what you need.

 

[bobovox]

I was using VituixCAD on a 2014 i5 ThinkPad with no problems- I’m sure something even more modest would have sufficed. As others have said, the requirements for speaker modelling software are not too onerous.

 

[tackleberry]

Hoping to get one in the next few weeks, hopefully I understand in practice, what I’ve seen on the tutorials!