Product Reviews

Carrera's Studio Pro range of desktops is aimed at those musicians, amateur and professional, who want to create and record music using something other than a Mac. There are several models on offer with varying degrees of functionality designed to appeal to different types of buyer. The dB-91 is pitched at the first-time, non- or semi-professional musician but, although it doesn't have the features available on some models, it's still a potent machine in its own right.

Carrera has taken a powerful Pentium II/450 system and added a quality sound card and speaker system and a DVD-RAM drive, giving you the ability to mix, record to disk and output to the DVD drive. It's housed in a smallish full-tower case with a plain fascia and a moderately noisy cooling fan. The case also emits a whine, traceable to the high-speed Seagate Cheetah hard disk. I found this irritating and would have to stow the system unit under a desk in order to muffle it.

The Microsoft mouse is scroll-wheel free and the lightweight Key Tronic keyboard has a mildly positive action.

Carrera has resisted the temptation to supply a 19in monitor and instead provides a 17in Idek Vision Master Pro 400 based on the Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube. This is a compact display that delivers a 16in image diagonal, comfortably surpasses the VESA-recommended 85Hz vertical refresh in XGA mode and is generally very satisfactory. The picture is bright, the focus is sharp to the corners, and the OSD controls are plentiful and simple enough to use .

However, the real show-stoppers are the Altec Lansing speakers. These follow the usual subwoofer with twin satellites pattern, but the tone from the wooden subwoofer baffle and the twin-cone satellites is very good. Of course, this is exactly as it should be, given the stated purpose of the machine, but anyone

There's quite a lot inside the case but an effort has been made to keep things tidy, so visibility and access is generally quite good. The expansion slots are heavily populated, with an 8Mb ATi 3D Xpert@Work in the AGP slot, a Diamond SupraExpress 56K modem below it and a Ubisoft Maxi Sound Home Studio Pro 64 sound card at the bottom in one of the ISA slots.

A second ISA slot, or rather its backplate cut-out, goes to the S/P-DIF daughterboard (Sony/Philips digital interface) which provides you with direct connections to the digital signal processor on the sound card via gold-plated RCA analog left and right I/O jacks as well as the digital S/P-DIF I/O jacks.

This leaves you with a total of two usable PCI slots but hopefully most, if not all, of what you need is already present. There are three memory sockets free as the 128Mb of PC100 SDRAM comes on a single DIMM. The last socket is slightly obstructed by the hard disk, but not to the extent that it's a real problem.

Drives are well taken care of by the dual- speed Panasonic DVD-RAM, Mitsubishi LS-120 and 9.1Gb Seagate Cheetah SCSI hard disk. An Adaptec 7895 dual-channel Ultra/UltraWide SCSI controller is built in to the motherboard, providing UW SCSI for the 10,000rpm Cheetah drive and Fast SCSI for the Panasonic DVD-RAM drive. The latter doubles as a 20-speed CD-ROM player and gives you 5.2Gb (2.6Gb per side) of rewritable storage for every cartridge used in DVD-RAM mode. Should the need arise for more drives, there are two front-opening 5.25in bays as well as one front-opening and one internal 3.5in bays free.

The Maxi Sound card is awash with features, including 128 instruments, 16 drum kits, 64-voice wavetable synthesis, multiple real-time reverb, echo, flange and chorus effects, four-band equalisation and eight-track mixing direct to disk. Instruments in the outside world can communicate with it in General MIDI or Roland MPU-401 UART modes. The board ships with 4Mb of RAM, but you can boost this to 8Mb or 20Mb to give yourself a bigger wavetable library.

The Studio Pro has one more trick up its sleeve, namely blindingly fast performance. The overall benchmark rating of 2.91 it achieved made it by some way the fastest Windows 95 platform yet tested in the PC Pro, leaving no-one in any doubt that this is a machine to be reckoned with.