KVR Audio

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Wed Dec 21, 2016 10:41 am

Mercuriall Audio Software has released Spark. As a person who is quite fond of playing through various incarnations of Marshall amp sims, this plugin greatly interests me. It models four Marshalls (finally, someone had the balls to not model the JCM900! although i think AFD has a similar diode-clipping mode... EDIT: sorry, was thinking of Silver Jubilee!), as well as four overdrive pedals and a few FX.

going from past Mercuriall developments, i never cared for the ENGL sim as it's not the sound i tend to go for, and earlier Tomato/JCM800 sims i didn't like as much because they had a very weird reaction to varying input levels, especially when it comes to handling overdrive pedals, so i ended up not using those either.

$120 ($99 intro) is a bit steep for a 4-amp, 4-stomp plugin (especially since it models only Marshalls - an obvious comparison would be S-Gear, which models much wider variety of amp sounds while having a similar amps-to-price ratio), but if it sounds good (i.e. better than Amplitube 4, S-Gear and Thermionik Marshalls, which is a reeeeeally tough challenge!), i might just pick it up.

one thing i'm curious about is that this plugin seems to also model free cabinet positioning. i'm curious of the technology employed there - is it something similar to Mercuriall Cab, or is "just" IR plus filtering, like everyone else?

andy4trance · Post by **andy4trance** » Wed Dec 21, 2016 11:35 am

But isn't the Mercuriall Engl cab just a continuous morphing between some real life IR's? I wasn't very curious of what's under the hood, but indeed the range of sounds from mike positioning is nice.
I think with the U530 they nailed it in the sense that it seems to have a wide sweet spot in term of usable sounds, you don't have to tweak much. Of course tone preference is subjective.

I personally like the high gain sounds, so these amps seem to be more in the borderline crunch zone.
On the other hand I like the 80s metal sound too...have to test the demo tonight.

andy4trance · Post by **andy4trance** » Wed Dec 21, 2016 8:43 pm

I can't test this, it cracles and pushes the CPU to above 50%. There is some sort of compatibility problems. None of my sim amps show such behavior. U530 works perfectly, Spark not working for me.

jinotsuh · Post by **jinotsuh** » Wed Dec 21, 2016 11:50 pm

worked fine for me, got a bit heavy pushing the oversample to 8x (or whatever the max is) but still fine

Pädy · Post by **Pädy** » Wed Dec 21, 2016 11:56 pm

I also get frequent crackles and the CPU erratically jumping up and down. Brandnew iMac 5k - no performance problems with anything else.

andy4trance · Post by **andy4trance** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 2:51 pm

There must be some sort of compatibility problem, it shouldnt push my CPU to 80%(even at no oversampling) while all other guitar amps stay below 20%.
I'm on windows 7, with focusrite audio interface.

Pädy · Post by **Pädy** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 3:03 pm

Denormal issues, maybe?

andy4trance · Post by **andy4trance** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 4:28 pm

To me it seems abnormal...

Now seriously, what's denormal and how to fix it?

No_Use · Post by **No_Use** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 4:43 pm

andy4trance wrote:To me it seems abnormal...

Now seriously, what's denormal and how to fix it?

Here's a plugin supposed to fix denormal issues (with explaination what it's about)

http://www.gvst.co.uk/gnormal_manual.htm

http://www.gvst.co.uk/gnormal.htm

(Not sure if it's a denormal issue you're having but maybe worth trying this plugin and see if it helps.)

aMUSEd · Post by **aMUSEd** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 5:05 pm

How many plugins does that make it called Spark now?

andy4trance · Post by **andy4trance** » Thu Dec 22, 2016 5:29 pm

Thanks No_Use and Pädy, but this didn't help.

ShawnMH · Post by **ShawnMH** » Fri Dec 23, 2016 3:41 am

I absolutely love this. It has the "special sauce" in there to sound, feel, and project like real Marshalls do. The squawk, rahhhh, chunk, chirp, edge/presence and extra 3d dimensionality of the original sounds is all in there. I had the demo loaded and played for all of 15 minutes with it, before I bought this.

The oversampling modes definitely have a fairly distinct effect on the sound, and also on CPU usage. I have an laptop with a Skylake i7 6820HK processor (2.7GHz) running continuously OC'd @ 3.7GHz. Interface is Zoom UAC-2. Loaded in Cubase Pro 8.5, with nothing else, it used 18 -20 % CPU on 8x oversampling mode. 16 -18 % @ 4x oversample. Compared to Cubase's VST Amps, Amplitube 4 Max, Peavey ReValver 4 (with a bunch of effects, and oversampling turned on), Bias FX Pro, a bunch of PA Bx amp sims, this is definitely hogging some CPU. I see the VST meter spiking on the regular too, no matter if ASIO Guard was on, off or anywhere in the middle. I can play around on 8x pretty much without any crackles - I might have heard one or 2, not sure, but 90+% of the time, no. In recording and production I'd use 4x or 2x, and be just fine.

The FX that come with this are definitely worthy additions to what is a great set of Marshall sounds. The delay, reverb, chorus, Tube Screamers and Grid Slammer will probably not get replaced often by me. Now the Noise Gate, I haven't heard this do a damned thing yet! Does anybody else notice this, or is it just me? Funny thing is, as a Marshall simulator, this can produce the same hiss and white noise as the originals on some settings and with overdrives added. Good for me that I don't get very much noise with my own settings.

In comparison to the other amp sims mentioned above, aside from some of Amplitube's Marshall approved versions, this gets you THAT sound immediately. To my ears it does it better than Amplitube 4 too, and that isn't knocking Amplitube, - their's are pretty legit in it's own right. Bx Rockrack has a pretty darn close JCM800, and ReValver's "Michael" (JCM900) and "BluesMaker" (JTM45/Early Plexi sounds) each do a decent impersonation respectively too. Bias FX is new to me, but seems to need a fair amount of tweaking so far to get close to Marshall territory. I am loving Bias, just not quite for Marshall sound - ye.t

So, even with a noise gate that I don't hear working, and even with high CPU usage on higher quality settings, I am STILL blown away with this one. In my opinion, they knocked this out of the park. If Mercuriall can optimize a bit for the CPU usage, fine. If they can make the noise gate work so I can hear it working, great. If not, I will still be using it...

Baxterbrown · Post by **Baxterbrown** » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:07 pm

andy4trance wrote:There must be some sort of compatibility problem, it shouldnt push my CPU to 80%(even at no oversampling) while all other guitar amps stay below 20%.
I'm on windows 7, with focusrite audio interface.

Having the same issue here. What DAW(s) are people using that are having this problem? I use Studio One 3.3 and the CPU hit averages around 60%. On my laptop with Studio One it was at 80% or more. I tested Spark in Reaper and it worked just fine, 6 to 8%. That's why I'm wondering if this issue is just Studio One related, or if it's other DAWs as well. FWIW, I also own U530 and it works just fine. Thanks.

EvilDragon · Post by **EvilDragon** » Fri Dec 23, 2016 4:55 pm

Again "awesome" CPU usage in Studio One, ehehe. That DAW is far from optimized.

Twrogstudio · Post by **Twrogstudio** » Fri Dec 23, 2016 5:12 pm

No problem here in Studio One 3.3. 9% generally and up to 28% in 8x. Hitting the same in Logic.

Mercuriall released Spark