Ah, that explains it. I knew I had seen you before. Hi!
With only 16 gb RAM, maybe you shouldn't even build orchestras/templates. But you may have made a very smart choice. You have bought two of the most advanced sampled string sections on the market: the Abbey Road V1 and cello, hopefully during a campaign. (The Spitfire cello and V1 file size is around 180gb on your hard drive – so the OS needs to fiddle around a lot in order to try to handle these instruments properly, but don't worry – these will be useful for many years to come.) And since truly powerful Macs are very pricey, it's good to start with something which lets you start to work right now (one track at a time), and sell that Mac + buy something more powerful later.
I don't have these (yet?), but in your case, I'd probably use them (for now) with only one mic option enabled, and only create the tracks you need – when you need them.
Maybe you even could consider a more bread/buttery library for now (for a much lower price than that V1/cello). Still, you can use the V1 for V1 and V2, and maybe the cello for viola as well (?) – or the V1 for viola unless you need the lowest half octave, and use Logic's factory library (or some other free libraries –
there are loads of them out there) for bass (and viola).
Since which library and Mac you use of course is a lot less important than starting to develop music making skills – and since most well known existing symphonies out there are written without a computer and on a piano which most of the time wasn't really well tuned or well tempered, I wouldn't worry in your situation.
As others have told you experimenting with lower preload buffers is also recommended, but even on a 64 gb Mac Pro I had to raise my Kontakt buffer settings from 6k (I had reduced them from the 60k factory default) to something higher – for better performance.
It's good that you have the project(s) you actively work with internally, since another thing you IMO should consider is to have most of your tracks (actually all, except the one you are working on right now) 'frozen'. It sounds boring, I know, but freeze/unfreeze is fast on a M2 Mac, and mainly working with frozen tracks may represent a major improvement.
More cores is a very good idea for orchestral stuff, but how many performance cores, and how many efficiency cores do you have? For this kind of work, what we want is many
performance cores.
Re. Logic's audio settings: it's definitely worth trying out all the I/O buffer size options, but ARM Macs are different than Intel Macs. In some cases, higher buffer settings may mean less good performance, on others not.
Remember to not have an active track selected when you play back or edit: create dummy track with nothing on and have that selected – an important trick many users with really powerful Macs also use.
Is Processing Threads (still in Logic's audio preferences) set to automatic, or have you changed it? Have you tried all the three Process Buffer Range settings (Small, Medium, Large)? Sometimes, Large helps, but on some ARM Macs, Small occasionally helps too.
Maybe it's tempting to sell your M2 Mac (while you still can get a good price for it) and buy something with more RAM, but once you reach the RAM amount often considered as a healthy minimum (at least on Intel Macs, 64 gb), prices increase.
And it's already 2024, so 3nm Macs will maybe already this year get competition from 2nm chips, there will probably be M3 iPads and MacBook Air models on the market within circa a year –
and this won't stop. Personally, I got into the recording studio thing since I knew a student who had spent so much time on building that studio, learning about which gear he needed etc, that he didn't have time to use it since he also needed to study. He just gave me the keys and ended ip never making music. Don't fall into that trap he fell into!
