KVR Audio

AXP · Post by **AXP** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 2:02 am

This is a topic for AXP Flextron support. Please report any issues and leave your feedback here. I will keep an eye on what's happening here and I will do my best to help as fast as possible.

fese · Post by **fese** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:17 pm

Well, I have to say from my memory it definitely sounds better than the Crate I had back then (which was from the eighties I think). And it looks great, your best GUI so far, nice looking and good to use. I am not much of a hi gain player, but your solid state emulations have style. You don't wanna hear me try to shred though

AXP · Post by **AXP** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:24 am

Many thanks!

As far as I know, the Flexwave circuit was introduced in nineties. So that might explain the difference.
The Cooltron tube definitely improves its sound a lot. Plus it makes an otherwise rather boring clean channel sing too.
I struggled with GUI a lot. Since it's got much more controls than my previous stuff I went through a number of sketches.
By the way if you bypass the preamp and speaker sections, you can use it as a generic non-guitar tube overdrive.

Dominus · Post by **Dominus** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 1:00 am

I had a Vox Bulldog for about a week but didn't care for it much. I never did try running it into one of my Crate amps though. I always preferred a Tube Screamer-type pedal for that.

I have to say, it only took me about 30 seconds to dial this in for a killer sound. I did bypass your speakers and added my favorite IR after it, but turning on the Tube "pre-EQ" really added to the sound. Set the levels, adjust the gain and EQ a little bit, and bam. I'll try to A-B this with my GX-130C next week, but this one is definitely going to be one of my go-to plugins.

After seeing this plugin, I'm thinking you'd probably be able to do a Marshall Valvestate sim. I don't think anyone's made one of those, and you'd really turn some heads with that. If you were in the USA I'd loan you one of mine to model. I know a lot of people might make a large fuss out of glowing tubes (both real and simulated) but there are a few solid state users out there that know what we're doing.

Ivan_C · Post by **Ivan_C** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 9:51 am

I'm playing a little with it, I like the sound, the fact that you can use the plug-in to do something not related with guitar, and the nice vumeters

I can't tell about how much it sounds like the original, the Crate combo amps being in my memory very bad (because of the cabinet more than the amp I think)

Jonas78 · Post by **Jonas78** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 12:39 pm

Am currently testing and trying out all entries and come across a cpu usage issue in Renoise when enabling your plugin. When instantiating the cpu rises gradually 52% on top of what it was before! Is this normal? Am running Renoise 3.0 on a vista Core2 duo laptop, 4 gigs ram.

jackoo · Post by **jackoo** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:15 pm

It sounds simply awesome!!! Thanks a lot for this plug-in and good luck in the contest

Cheers!

Rah · Post by **Rah** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:20 pm

I'm impressed by the sound, I'll probably keep this in my regular amp and cab sim circulation.

Dandruff · Post by **Dandruff** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:38 pm

Cool plugin! But really quite CPU hungry (on Intel Core2 Duo E6700).

Maybe the oversampling shouldn't get reset to 16x on each preset change? With 16x oversampling I'm getting crackles all over the place. 1x seems to work.

RunBeerRun · Post by **RunBeerRun** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:47 pm

I also think the presets should be set at 1x oversampling, this would cripple a slower computer. I'm not a fan of guitar amps, so I've been trying it with an external distortion and the clean setting. Not bad, a little high end eq-heavy, I would have liked to see more tweak options, amp & speaker stuff.

Ivan_C · Post by **Ivan_C** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:56 pm

I agree, I think 16x oversampling is maybe a little too much

8x should be the maximum, and 4x should be the default value everywhere maybe

Dandruff · Post by **Dandruff** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 2:58 pm

Too bad, rendering gives total garbage output here (REAPER 4.71 x64, Win8.1).

Flextron on Master track -> Master track rendering (48kHz, offline rendering): garbage output (chopped of sound)
Flextron on vsti track -> Master track rendering (48kHz, offline rendering): overload (> +600dB output)

Something definitely not right with this.

eidenk · Post by **eidenk** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:05 pm

My host "load meter" constantly spikes with accompanying audio drop outs/clicks if spring reverb or any of the speaker modes is on.

I've got a similar issue with the SoftAmp FM25 plug which spikes all the time no matter what, all the other AXP plugs run without issues though.

Would get points from me if this was fixed.

Cheers.

AXP · Post by **AXP** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:28 pm

Thanks for the reports. I'm currently investigating the performance issue.

Jonas78: I'm grabbing Renoise 3.0 demo to see if I can reproduce it. It's definitely not normal.

Dandruff: Oversampling is a part of preset, because it's a public parameter visible to the host. I could have made it a separate hidden parameter but it would be lost upon reloading the project (for example). Making default presets run at 1x makes sense. I'll release an update shortly. I couldn't reproduce the rendering issue no matter how I tried (Reaper 4.71/x64). Is it 100% reproducible? May I ask you to PM me your project file (with or without wav's)?

RunBeerRun: I'm OK with 1x presets, will do that. As for more tweaks. I don't know, probably would be too overwhelming. There are definitely some controllable but hidden ones, like supply voltage, tube bias and grid current limiting resistor (the latter was adjustable with a trim pot in the original Cooltron), but making them variable in real-time would take some good effort (clicks, CPU spikes, etc)

Wolfen666: I have dropped 16x in my plugins before, but got asked to bring it back, so I made it configurable. I too think that 4x-8x is enough.

Eidenk: The convolution engine is the same for both the spring reverb and the speakersim, and it's the same as the one used in FM25. So we can narrow it down to the convolution. That's strange, as I've specifically made sure to even out the CPU load so it doesn't spike. I need more details: your CPU, OS, the host you are using.

Here's what my benchmarks show - that's without the host overhead (Core i5 4-core / 3.4 GHz)

performance.png

Note that preamp and tube sections are single-threaded, so they don't depend on the CPU core count.
Spring reverb and Speaker sim sections are multi-threaded, so they (especially the reverb) scale well on multiple cores. Oversampling (not shown here) only affects the preamp and the tube.
In Reaper, I see at most 6% load with everything enabled (all sections, stereo, 16x), but I'm not sure what it actually measures.

And thanks everyone for the kind words!

Dandruff · Post by **Dandruff** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:41 pm

AXP wrote:Dandruff: Oversampling is a part of preset, because it's a public parameter visible to the host. I could have made it a separate hidden parameter but it would be lost upon reloading the project (for example). Making default presets run at 1x makes sense. I'll release an update shortly.

Thanks!

AXP wrote:I couldn't reproduce the rendering issue no matter how I tried (Reaper 4.71/x64). Is it 100% reproducible? May I ask you to PM me your project file (with or without wav's)?

I'll send you an email tomorrow with a small project.

Looks like it's 100% reproducable here. Tried it with 32 and 256 samples buffer sizes.

AXP Flextron DC14 support [1.0.03 / 11.08.2014]