2CAudio B2. What does B2 mean?

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I brought 2CAudio B2 recently and I think it's excellent. I'm wondering though what B2 stands for or is an acronym for. Anyone know?

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Hi,

The very first initial concept of B2 was to simply take two Breeze engines and put them in a single plug using the balance, cascade and mix controls you see now. So "two Breezes" = "B2". That was the initial concept. It was supposed to be a simple project initially.

But being the obessive perfectionists that we are, we got drastically carried away and basically rewrote all of the aspects that were common to Breeze and then added a ton of stuff that was never part of Breeze and never will be. During that procress we made all sorts of other discoveries as well which led to the final evolution of B2.

B2 is our most scientific/mathematical verb product in that it deals with dsp aspects at a lower, less abstracted level than aether for example which is more of a physical, real world approach.

B2 is like our top secret research platform where we try out various ideas and allow as much as absolutely possible without placing and kind of judgment on what is ideal in any kind of absolute sense. We figure any/all configurations and settings may be useful to someone somewhere for some variety of music. B2 is wide open and experimental in this capacity. It is also capable of some aggressive sounds when using the attitude control.

Thus B2 as reference to the stealth aircraft seamed fitting too, though I am personally against the glorification of violence. Nontheless the high-technology aspect of aerospace engineering seemed fitting for B2 and I am a big fan space exploration and associated extreme engineering.

Additionally I am American, while Denis my partner is Russian. B2 the aircraft is a product of the Cold War. Denis and i were both born in the mid 70s when the US and Russia were still not very friendly. As I generally believe humanity is always better off working together instead of finding new ways to try to isolate and kill one another, I found it to be a romantic/idealist/humanistic (in all the best possible meaning of those words) concept to take the name of something that was basically a war machine and turn it into something that produces joy and beauty and emotion and at the same time encourages rational and scientific thought. I was attracted to the "swords into plough shares" concept wrapped into a modern real life metaphor.

Perhaps that's a little deeper than expected and too much information. :scared: but it's a nice thing to keep in mind in terms of ideals etc. IMHO.
Last edited by Andrew Souter on Fri May 16, 2014 4:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Thank you very much for that very helpful and epic reply. I had suspected the 2 was in relation to the 2 engines but didn't click on B for being Breeze but now that you have mentioned it I'm expressing a deserved "DUH!" at myself. It is an incredible reverb but also an insane sound design tool that creates very very different effects that I haven't heard or created with anything else before. Thank you for answering that for me.

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It's also the second banana in pyjamas
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananas_in_Pyjamas
"I was wondering if you'd like to try Magic Mushrooms"
"Oooh I dont know. Sounds a bit scary"
"It's not scary. You just lose a sense of who you are and all that sh!t"

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Galbanum wrote:B2 is wide open and experimental in this capacity. It is also capable of some aggressive sounds when using the attitude control.
Just to ad I always would have a few reverb's that I would feed into each other in my projects and ad different dynamics and distortions in between them for flavor so It's very helpful for me that B2 has the Attitude distortions and cascade feature. I also like the ability to swap and change engines independently. Thanks

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Here is the one special preset for all users of B2.
For sharing. :party:


https://soundcloud.com/dens-place/480hall
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Last edited by xtrax on Thu May 29, 2014 6:34 am, edited 2 times in total.

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That is cool!

I should probably have emailed you this, but lets say I bought Breeze in your current sale, and I also own Aether now, would there be a special upgrade price to the full storm? B2 + All presets ?

Also, is Breeze is the most CPU efficient reverb you do and where does B2 fit on the CPU intensity scale?

I imagine a lot of it has to do with tail times, but lets say they were all using similar settings?

Thanks, sorry if this is the wrong place to post all these questions.

Sami
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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xtrax wrote:Here is the one special preset for all users of B2.
For sharing. :party:

Interesting thanks.

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Aiynzahev wrote:That is cool!

I should probably have emailed you this, but lets say I bought Breeze in your current sale, and I also own Aether now, would there be a special upgrade price to the full storm? B2 + All presets ?
Yes, you can always upgrade whatever you have to the full PS bundle. The general offer is you pay 60% of the normal retail price of whatever you are missing from the bundle.
Aiynzahev wrote: Also, is Breeze is the most CPU efficient reverb you do and where does B2 fit on the CPU intensity scale?

I imagine a lot of it has to do with tail times, but lets say they were all using similar settings?
Well if I can play semantics for a second, "efficient" should be defined by how fast a fixed set of operations can be performed. If B2 performs a million operations in 2 seconds, and Breeze performs 10 in 1 second, B2 is more "efficient" even though it takes longer to complete the task.

All of our verbs are more or less equally "efficient". All of the important DSP code is hand-written in assembly by Denis. Comparing operation to operation they are roughly the same, and in fact are often exactly the same since we don't rewrite our basic DSP building blocks each time once we have them already designed and optimized.

So the question of how much CPU usage will something use comes down to how many operations does the (current state of the) algorithm actually have to perform (and what is the memory usage pattern etc etc.)

On average Breeze is the simplest in terms of operations performed, and therefore uses the least CPU resources on average.

BUT! B2 is basically completely modular, CPU usage varies HUGELY/RIDICULOUSLY/HUMONGOUSLY/(choose any other choice synonym from a thesaurus and inset here :D ) based on the preset. B2 processes only whatever is needed for the given preset. You can, if you like, create a preset in B2 that is a simple "feed-forward" delay. i.e. take the input, delay it, and that is the output. That requires almost zero CPU usage. You can also alternatively, turn on both engines, set both to XTRM, use diffusion, use modulation for both, turn on oversampling, use complex damping filters, use positive density, turn on dynamics, turn on attitude, etc. All of these add extra operations that must be performed. Most of them happen in VERY efficient manners, but if we add more operations this is simply more for the CPU to calculate. All operations have some kind of CPU cost.

CPU usage in Breeze is much more consistent. It is possible to make good sounding verb presets in B2 that use less CPU than Breeze. But the average preset uses significantly more. B2 can load Breeze presets as "engine presets" (They are not exact due to differences in the algorithms, but they are similar.). If you disable one engine, set OS to 1x, and load a Breeze engine preset, CPU usage will be the same between Breeze and B2.

Oversampling can stress the RAM/Cache systems a lot too in some circumstances (such as using XTRM modes with oversampling.)

In contrast to convolution, decay time (RT60) does NOT effect CPU usage. 120 seconds does not take any more CPU resources than 1 second. (ridiculously huge SIZE (not time) might inadvertently effect performance bc it stresses the memory systems.)

Hope it helps. :tu:

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Thank you very much for the detailed response. Hmm makes it a bit more difficult then!

I apologize for using the term efficient as though they are badly written, I meant low CPU cost.

Looks like Breeze is my ticket for more general duties.

Just one more question, how do you get a perfect storm offer? I didn't see a coupon in the Galbanum store.

Thanks

Sami
Aiynzahev-sounds
Sound Designer - Soundsets for Pigments, Repro, Diva, Virus TI, Nord Lead 4, Serum, DUNE2, Spire, and others

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Aiynzahev wrote:Thank you very much for the detailed response. Hmm makes it a bit more difficult then!
It doesn't matter which path you take. All roads lead to The Perfect Storm, er, I mean Rome... :wink:
Aiynzahev wrote: I apologize for using the term efficient as though they are badly written, I meant low CPU cost.
I didn't take it that way. I just try to be precise with the language when writing these kind of informative posts in effort to help better inform whoever might be reading... you know, for posterity...

It's kind of an unusual thing for an algo verb to vary in CPU usage by easily over a factor of 150X (one-hundred-and-fifty-times, not percent). So I try to be precise in my explanations so that concept is better understood.

Sorry if it sounds "preachy". :wink: I just think it's helpful to be as precise as possible.
Aiynzahev wrote: Looks like Breeze is my ticket for more general duties.
Cool. Ya it's great for traditional music needs and more subtle things.
Aiynzahev wrote: Just one more question, how do you get a perfect storm offer? I didn't see a coupon in the Galbanum store.

Thanks

Sami
There are too many variations of that to have a general coupon, so I handle it manually on a case by case basis. Just write us an email when you want to do that.

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Galbanum wrote:
It doesn't matter which path you take. All roads lead to The Perfect Storm, er, I mean Rome... :wink:

LOL
This is soo good.. I like Your sense of humor

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