I strongly recommend a "hand-built box" (by you or someone else) as opposed to a department store machine. But if I had to go with a prepackaged machine I think I'd consider a Dell or Micron.
But check out the prices at places like
MyJackRabbit.com -- where you can specify every part/sub-assembly. This avoids most all of the compromises involved in buying an all-in-one system.
(I strongly recommend against E-machines, Compaq, and sadly, now, Hewlett Packard. I don't want to offend anyone who owns one and hopefully they haven't had any problems -- but, especially in the case of Compaq and E-machines there are serious customer satisfaction issues. Compaq is always near the very bottom of the PC Magazine customer satisfaction surveys, and E-machines isn't much better. HP has begun a slide that is very sad to see, as well. I used to always buy and recommend HP printers, and handled the purchases of several HP boxes in the past for family members... but the company is sinking.)
If you do buy a "store" computer make sure you get rid of the incredible array of junk software that is not just loaded on to them -- but is loaded into the boot profile. I recently walked a neice through removing something like 10 completely useless and RAM-hogging background programs that had come loaded on her HP... junk like menus that are supposed to help you but just confuse every naive user I've ever seen try to use them, ad-ware, AOL messenger, all kinds of garbage.
With regard to specific recommendations... I wouldn't bust my backside to spend the money on a SCSI drive unless I was putting together a totally top-end box. The latest 7200 RPM ATA-100 are very fast.
In fact one of my video pals (a guy with a farm of Macs) is building a close to top end
PC system for vid editing and he strongly recommends the new 7200 rpm Western Digital IDE (IDE and ATA are essentially the same) with an
8 mB buffer. (This is a guy who always used 10,000 RPM Cheetahs and Seagates on SCSI.)
If you're spending much money at all on your system I wouldn't settle for a SoundBlaster -- although they're fine to start out and they make a great 'second' card.
They're great consumer and gaming cards. I have one for everyday use and testing. (Right now I'm using
an Echo Mia as my recording card.) The sound on the SB Live I hav e is a tiny bit grainy but entirely adequate -- and hey, it only cost $60. Where they really shine for a lot of us as second cards, though, is in their built-in Sound Font wavetable synths. The sounds that come with them are pretty hokey -- but you can download (for free and not) all kinds of great sounding drum kits, samples, loops, instrument hits, libraries, etc. Live and Audigy cards can use system RAM for samples, too. On my 500 mB system I sometimes devote between 32 and 80 mB of RAM to soundfonts.
However, don't be fooled by Creative's way-too-liberal use of the 24/96 logos on their Audigy line. That's PLAYBACK ONLY! Even the pricey Audigy Platinum still records at a max rate of 16/48(the Platinum is the one with a minimal mic preamp built into it and offers a 'break-out faceplate' with mic and line inputs that mounts in a drive bay -- I'd rather have an open drive bay, pretty much. Get a real mic preamp.)
Good cards that really do record up to 24/96* start under two hundred dollars and there are some cards with 2 in and 4 or even 8 out that go for not much more than that. And, of course, you can keep on spending up.
SInce you're buying or building a tower I'd definitely stick with either an internal card or an external box that connects to its own PCI card inside the machine. There are some multi-channel Firewire boxs from good outfits like MOTU that are great for laptops -- the data throughput is good but there appear to be some latency issues with regard to the large buffers used in the Firewire standard. I'm trying to get more info on this issue. (Bottom line, Firewire can handle a lot of data -- but it can be slow 'getting started' because the buffer has to be filled up before the transfer can begin.)
If you're recording live sound you'll want a good mic or two and a good preamp -- which could be standalone or part of a mixer. And, of course, if you want to take advantage of multi-channel cards (as opposed to 2 in / 2 out stereo cards) a mixer will be central to your cause. Another piece of gear that frequently appears in the front of a PC recording chain is a compressor of kind... either an all-purpose compressor / limiter with a lot of control (harder to master) or a specialized voice/instrument compressor. (A typical chain would be mic(s) to preamp to compressor to sound interface. There are also affordable and not-so combo preamp-compressors that can be a great deal for a small studio.)
Also, back to the PC. A lot of serious PC musicians recommend having two hard drives: the boot and system drive (with your OS and applications) and another (the fastest of the two if there's a diff) just for audio and music. If at all possible, these drives should be on their own IDE controller channels (or SCSI channels). If you need to, put your CD burner on the slave channel of your system drive.)
Obviously, having a bunch of RAM is good, too. Between 512 and a gB is probably plenty. (hey, a guy read me the riot act the other day because I didn't know that all the metric prefixes are supposed to be lower case... it looks weird to me, too, to write "gB" instead of "GB" but that's apparently what the international standards committe said... so...) If you're doing video or very serious megapixel photography you might even go for more (but some mother boards max out at a gig).
Oh, yeah, and make sure your power supply fan is temperature controlled ("whisper quiet"). Some system integrators cheap out on the case and, particularly, the power supply. The cheap PS that came with the box I used when I first build my machine was pretty loud -- and the PS fan developed a bad bearing after a little over a year -- which was a blessing because I went out and spent $45 on a "quiet" PS ($10 more than the case and original PS but still pretty cheap...
). The new fan was something like only about 20% as loud. And a weak or uneven power supply can damage any or all of the components in your system and cause glitching and application errors. If you PS is underpowered it can actually cause the components to run hotter. (The way I've heard it explained is the capacitors take longer to build up to their discharge point if the power is to weak, so heat builds up in them... but I sort of think this was an almost metaphorical explanation. But, anyhow, the same basic principal applies to all electronic gear. Power supplies aren't sexy but they're very important.
I'm sure I'll think of more, later, when I'm safely away from my computer...
Have fun!
*But stick with 24/44.1 for general use. You'll find info scattered throughout this bboard on why it's the 'sweet spot' if your product will be going out on CD or mp3s. Using 96 kHz can actually produce worse results if it has to be converted down to the 44.1 kHz standard.
PS... this may be the longest post I've ever made. And that's saying something. Geez... why can't I sit down and write that freakin' novel...
PPS... make sure you check out
mano 1's ongoing thread
Using Windows XP as a DAW OS , filled with lots and lots of info and experience.
).
There's probably a moral in here somewhere.