Stuart McCredie got in touch with us to report his finding whilst using his MacBook Pro in response to our story on the new and Old Mac Pro.

In that response Stuart also commented…

Heavy use tracking the band all week via thunderbolt chassis & HDX. Faultless. 

So in the light of concerns about the noise levels from Magma chassises we asked Stuart to expand on his experiences with a Magma chassis and his 15” Retina MacBook Pro with Haswell 2.6GHz, 16GB ram & 1TB ssd. Stuart told us…

The Magma EB3T with the quiet fan they retro fitted on its lowest setting (which Avid don’t recommend) is just about usable in the room you’re mixing in.

You can’t record any vocals or acoustics with it on. I’d say it’s not as quiet as my old 12 core Pro. I’ve emailed Magma about it & waiting to hear back. I have no idea about the noise generated by the new Roben chassis fans (seems likely it’ll have been designed for machine rooms to me) but the new Sonnet Echo Express III is meant to be the quietest yet. But I really don’t want to have to consider a rackmounted solution as the portability of the Magma is great.

Magma & Avid need to find a quieter portable solution. I was horrified when I first got mine & set up the initial fan they sent me as per Avid’s instructions. Its clearly designed to be portable & sit next to a laptop or iMac, but it is so noisy that it needs to be in a machine room or iso-rack yet thunderbolt cables at that point on 2m in length. The 10m Thunderbolt cable that Apple now sell in the Apple Store will help but all in all its a bit of a shame. 

Do you have any experieces of the current Magma chassises, especially the Thunderbolt capable ones? How noisy do you find them?  Can you track with them in the room? Have you tried using any of the other Thunderbolt expanion chassises like the Sonnet one that Stuart referred too? Please do tell us your experiences whether they are good or bad, Thanks.