As far as fan noise is concerned, I have a zero tolerance to any outside noises in the control room, so even the very quietest of machines has to live the other side of a brick wall in the machine room. There are ways of making any computer very quiet (e.g. water cooling) but putting them in another room is the only real way of solving that problem. They all make some noise and if you are listening for the noise floor on some ultra quiet piece of a very dynamic piece of music, then even the quietest water cooled Mac-Pro is unacceptable (and that's the quietest I've heard so far).
I would say that a Radar is slightly noisier than an ordinary office PC, so - as the man said - there's room for improvement using quieter fans etc.
As far as the converters are concerned, are they better? Yes. Are they better than anything else? I don't know, I have not yet heard everything out there, but they are better than Apogee and PT 192s by a considerable margin. For noisy stuff, this does not make that much difference, but for critical classical piano, it does.
There are two huge problems with iZ-Tech's Radar -
1. It is not a mouse-click-and-drop DAW. Using it is like using a tape recorder and the zoom-in depth is poor. That means that you will be editing by ear and not eye and that is not every man's way of working.
2. (And this is the huge problem with Radar and one that every Radar owner never stops banging on about!) Radar will spoil you for EVERY other system. There is almost no learning curve. Every function seems to just explain itself to you as you work. That Session Controller just is laid out perfectly. Recording is rock-solid and what goes in, comes out. No colouration. No top-end harshness that comes from poor clocking or external clocking. When you ask the machine to load a new project, it does so in less than four seconds. So no going for a coffee, whilst it is doing something. It's already done it. It always works. The only thing that could possibly happen to it is a complete hard-disk failure. The main functions are marked - export, import, gain-fade, copy, paste. It's all there with its own function. And you can set up your own eight macros and assign them to eight dedicated buttons. The scrub-wheel is as good as any I have used in the best video editors.
Although the machine is fairly deep and complex, it is easier to use than a tape recorder, the tech support has always been very good, better than any other I have experienced in audio.
Although the Radar is based on a PC, there is nothing PC about it. The OS (BeOS) is kept well below the hood and you will only ever need to enter that World for a very, very few functions such as setting up the ftp protocols.
Everybody is trying to second-guess this market right now and the manufacturers most of all. So exactly what iZ has planned is kept fairly quiet, but the development of a set of converters would just make a great deal of sense, though one thing we can be certain of is that they will not be cheap. Despite what has just been stated above by an iZ 'insider' there is a clear demand for the best converters that money can buy and I would expect a series of ADDA boxes to be launched over the Winter.
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