Hmmm.. interesting...

digitalscream

kskelectrics said:

These are great suggestions. I think heat will not prove to be a problem. Temperature probes inserted into the current plywood prototypes aren't raising red flags yet. We expect a metal box to be better still. Part of the choice of the G18xx Haswell series is driven by lower power / lower heat.

(One of the co-founders, Karu Sankaralingam's own research area is reducing power and heat of modern computer systems.)

It wasn't so much a suggestion to reduce the heat directly - I'm more interested in the ruggedness side of it. If you use a heatpipe/heatsink which doesn't anchor to the board, you can reduce the mass of metal required and reduce the chance of a tension/stress-induced failure. The problem is that lightweight heat dissipators like that can rarely handle the heat output of a desktop CPU, hence the idea of underclocking Hell, you might even be able to get it to run passive, thus removing the fan as a potential point of failure (which would probably cheer @ICBM up too).

kskelectrics

Drew_fx said:

I have a question actually - my main beef with some other gear out there has been with patch change latency and gaps of silence between the patches.

Have you looked at this at all?

I see that Revalver 4 has a live mode, which is supposed to give seamless patch changes.

Hi DrewFX - Switching can be made difficult due to sample buffering done by some plugins. A complex plugin might require 1024 samples before spitting out any results. That's approximately 20 msec right there.

We have two strategies for high speed switching (which will indeed be high speed depending on the plugins in the patch). First is allowing more than one digital path through one patch. A foot switch can switch between them. In this method, all paths are loaded and ready.

Second, we have a concept of a gig bag. You might have hundreds of boards saved but know you'll only use three at a particular gig. Those three would go into a gig bag. The next and previous foot switches cycle between only these three. Because we know which boards you can potentially use, we *may* be able to preload all boards in a gig bag so that there is no additional delay imposed by switching.

Does anyone here remember the Amiga, ASDG, ADPro or Elastic Reality? Those were my products back in the day - very popular. People would ask me "How'd you figure out what features to add?" Our reply was "We asked our users." This is my way of saying your feedback is vital and appreciated.

Heartfeltdawn

@joeyowen There is no comparison between, say, M13 reverbs and the sort of stuff being thrown out by the like of Valhalla.Something like ReaPitch within Reaper pisses all over the Whammy or the pitchshifters in most multi-effects units. 

@Drew_fx Having their own software company to produce stock plug-ins is a must in my book both so that there are stock plugs that are guaranteed to work with the system and to provide a future source of income for the company. 

kskelectrics

digitalscream said:

kskelectrics said:

These are great suggestions. I think heat will not prove to be a problem. Temperature probes inserted into the current plywood prototypes aren't raising red flags yet. We expect a metal box to be better still. Part of the choice of the G18xx Haswell series is driven by lower power / lower heat.

(One of the co-founders, Karu Sankaralingam's own research area is reducing power and heat of modern computer systems.)

It wasn't so much a suggestion to reduce the heat directly - I'm more interested in the ruggedness side of it. If you use a heatpipe/heatsink which doesn't anchor to the board, you can reduce the mass of metal required and reduce the chance of a tension/stress-induced failure. The problem is that lightweight heat dissipators like that can rarely handle the heat output of a desktop CPU, hence the idea of underclocking Hell, you might even be able to get it to run passive, thus removing the fan as a potential point of failure (which would probably cheer @ICBM up too).

I didn't want fans either I believe Karu is monitoring here as well - Karu - listen to what digitalscream is saying. Or as we say internally - make a mantis issue out of it please.

Is it OK that I am replying so much? I don't wish to offend.

digitalscream

kskelectrics said:

Is it OK that I am replying so much? I don't wish to offend.

Not at all, mate - as I said in my PM, we're more than happy for you to use this forum as a sounding board. Think of it this way - the only reason you're replying so much is that our members are actively engaging with you. From where I'm standing, that can only be a good thing for all concerned.

ICBM

digitalscream said:

Hell, you might even be able to get it to run passive, thus removing the fan as a potential point of failure (which would probably cheer @ICBM up too).

Oh yes . One of my jobs this week was another of those damn Ashdowns with PCB-mounted heatsinks *and* fan cooling. Still, I charge by the hour so having to dismantle and thoroughly clean the thing out before I even bothered looking for the cracked solder joint didn't hurt too much.

Not a fan of fans really .

PolarityMan

I think someone made a rack unit like this aimed at live keyboard players.might be worth digging that out and see if there's any lessons that can be learned.

joeyowen

kskelectrics said:

Hi - I'm one of the "50s looking white gang." I'll try to answer your thoughtful questions. 

haha, sorry buddy, I was only talking about the dress sense of the guitarist!

ThePrettyDamned

Mate, this is what this forum should be all about - who better to ask than the folk who will use it?!

I'm more excited now, knowing you're so open to suggestions. I'm sure it's in relatively early stages, but I like the idea. Sure beats devi evers idea of cartridge pedals...

monquixote

I wonder what sort of latency you can get through one of these. 

That tends to be the killer for me when playing through PC based stuff. 

joeyowen

Heartfeltdawn said:

@joeyowen There is no comparison between, say, M13 reverbs and the sort of stuff being thrown out by the like of Valhalla.Something like ReaPitch within Reaper pisses all over the Whammy or the pitchshifters in most multi-effects units. 

I agree completely with that, but what percentage of the market do we think will move from traditional multi effects such as TC, Boss, Line6 etc to something this new? And although there are a lot of great great VSTs, many will require an extra cost (although that has not been a problem with the Eventide H9 and the users)

I wonder if this would be a hit with Radiohead fans, they love their effects right?

I reiterate I would love to see this come into production, and I will check finances come payday (although I have a new born baby so complete wrong time for me) but we'll see. 

Apologies if I'm coming across like a twat!

Drew_TNBD

PolarityMan said:

I think someone made a rack unit like this aimed at live keyboard players.might be worth digging that out and see if there's any lessons that can be learned.

Receptor. We've got two at our office.

Heartfeltdawn

monquixote said:

I wonder what sort of latency you can get through one of these. 

That tends to be the killer for me when playing through PC based stuff. 

I can't imagine it'll be a problem. I'm getting under 5ms latency on Reaper with a far from expensive Steinberg UR22 running at 48kHZ. A stripped down OS for the unit that's really set up for audio processing with regard to things like power management should mean lower DPC latency. 

Heartfeltdawn

joeyowen said:

I agree completely with that, but what percentage of the market do we think will move from traditional multi effects such as TC, Boss, Line6 etc to something this new? And although there are a lot of great great VSTs, many will require an extra cost (although that has not been a problem with the Eventide H9 and the users)

I wonder if this would be a hit with Radiohead fans, they love their effects right?

Well, the POD wasn't traditional in 1998 when it first came out. Think of the environment back then: digital recording was still developing as something that could be done at home (I was running Cubase 3.55 on a Soundblaster!), plugins were still quite basic compared to now, mobile phones were machines for playing snake on... 

Now you have people who run entire recording systems on computer. Phones have real computing power. The fear of digital has gone away in a lot of guitarists (I'm positive that many who hated digital ten years ago now happily use Strymon for instance). I'm not sure digital amps will ever wow enough guitarists to gain full acceptance but digital effects certainly have done as they have developed. 

KSK are ambitious with the Psyren and it's a very cool concept. Maybe they will break through and get mainstream acceptance. That will depend on price, functionality, and reliability. 

kskelectrics

monquixote said:

I wonder what sort of latency you can get through one of these. 

That tends to be the killer for me when playing through PC based stuff. 

@monquixote - the audio board we're using allows a latency of 256 samples. Latency above this might be imposed by plugins.

EricTheWeary

One commenter got our intent exactly right - modern on the inside - old school on the outside. After set up, 2014 technology like laptops and tablets can be put away.

For idiots like me that's what is appealing, I like the option to actually cut down the parameters on effects - a row of virtual one knob effects would be great! I was, though, unclear on if you could change anything on the fly - without access to your android or iOS device. When I was doing gigs with provided/ borrowed back line I often had to change pedal settings, sometimes part way through the set. With multi FX this was possible but fiddly.

littlegreenman

From someone who records my stuff entirely in the digital domain (OK, 99% there, I still use a valve pre-amp at the front end), this is conceptually right up my street. I'd like to hear demo's of pristeen cleans, swirly nonsense and multi-tap delays, etc though before I'd get excited. The vid of the guy mangling fuzz tones is great but not very inspiring.*


*Just my 2p, the overall concept is pretty awesome

Drew_TNBD

kskelectrics said:

monquixote said:

I wonder what sort of latency you can get through one of these. 

That tends to be the killer for me when playing through PC based stuff. 

@monquixote - the audio board we're using allows a latency of 256 samples. Latency above this might be imposed by plugins.

That's too high. 64 is a basic requirement imho.

kskelectrics

EricTheWeary said:

One commenter got our intent exactly right - modern on the inside - old school on the outside. After set up, 2014 technology like laptops and tablets can be put away.

For idiots like me that's what is appealing, I like the option to actually cut down the parameters on effects - a row of virtual one knob effects would be great! I was, though, unclear on if you could change anything on the fly - without access to your android or iOS device. When I was doing gigs with provided/ borrowed back line I often had to change pedal settings, sometimes part way through the set. With multi FX this was possible but fiddly.

Hi EricTheWeary, 

There are two levels of "virtualization" of the knobs and switches. As you point out, you can select which of the VST controls become knobs on the tablet. The Psyren box as three "mappable" knobs and 7 mappable foot switches. Any control can be mapped to a physical control in the same way as mapping to a virtual control. Here is a link to a video showing this happen. 

EricTheWeary

kskelectrics said:

EricTheWeary said:

One commenter got our intent exactly right - modern on the inside - old school on the outside. After set up, 2014 technology like laptops and tablets can be put away.

For idiots like me that's what is appealing, I like the option to actually cut down the parameters on effects - a row of virtual one knob effects would be great! I was, though, unclear on if you could change anything on the fly - without access to your android or iOS device. When I was doing gigs with provided/ borrowed back line I often had to change pedal settings, sometimes part way through the set. With multi FX this was possible but fiddly.

Hi EricTheWeary, 

There are two levels of "virtualization" of the knobs and switches. As you point out, you can select which of the VST controls become knobs on the tablet. The Psyren box as three "mappable" knobs and 7 mappable foot switches. Any control can be mapped to a physical control in the same way as mapping to a virtual control. Here is a link to a video showing this happen. 

excellent.