Muse Research and Development is debuting a new Solid Sate Drive (SSD) technology option for the RECEPTOR 2 PRO line of hardware plug-in players at the 127th AES show in New York City. SSD dramatically increases the data throughput of the RECEPTOR 2 PRO and PRO MAX for greater polyphony and lower latency, as well as increasing the ruggedness of an already robust design by replacing the traditional rotating hard drive with solid state drive technology with no moving parts.

The SSD option is available on either the RECEPTOR 2 PRO or RECEPTOR 2 PRO MAX models, and offers either 128GB or 256GB of storage. These new storage devices dramatically enhance the performance of the already-impressive RECEPTOR 2 PRO or PRO MAX by increasing the speed at which data is read from the drive by a factor of up to 5 when compared with a standard hard drive mechanism. The result is a dramatic increase in polyphony, along with reduced boot time, faster sample loading, and the ability to run some sample-based programs at much lower latency settings.

Solid State Drive technology addresses the bottleneck in modern data systems
RECEPTOR 2 has a fast processor RAM computational engine that performs with remarkable efficiency. The result is very high polyphony counts at exceptionally low latency with the 4GB of RAM installed in the system. Until SSD technology arrived the general belief has been that extending RAM memory to 16, 32, or even 64GB is a better way to achieve higher levels of performance. This requires a move to 64-bit operating systems, and comes with a commensurate increase in system overhead, increased power consumption and heat generation, along with dramatically longer load times to fill the RAM before you can start making music. Muse R&D has discovered that the real bottleneck is getting data off of the drive subsystem, and that a fast data retrieval system enables you to do much more with the existing RAM, amplifies the advantage of faster load times, and keeps the system quiet by managing power consumption.

Although RECEPTOR 2 ships with a SATA-2 drive interface built in which is capable of delivering data to the processing subsystem up to 300MB/s, in reality the existing rotating platter hard drives are only capable of delivering continuous data streams of 60MB/s to the processing subsystem. The Muse R&D philosophy is to improve system efficiency, and increasing the speed at which you get the data off the storage subsystem and into the processor goes a long way toward achieving this goal.

RAID drive systems, which increase data throughput by spreading the data across two or four drives do allow data to be delivered to the processing subsystem quicker, but they also add complexity, fragility, heat, and weight to a rig.

The new SSD technology offers significant performance advantages when reading data over a traditional rotating platter drive by orienting the data in a "virtual raid array" across the storage field. The result is continuous read speeds of between 250MB/s and 300MB/s. The fact that there is no friction in the system means that system heat is reduced, and since there are no moving parts, the storage subsystem is impervious to shock, vibration, and the rigors of constant touring. The result is an optimal combination of higher data throughput with improved ruggedness and reliability.

Two drives available: 128GB and 256GB.
Based on extensive testing and real-world touring experience, Muse R&D offers two configurations of this technology to customers like film composers and mission-critical touring situations where high polyphony and the ultimate in reliability is required.

"The solid state drive technology offers significant performance benefits to our most demanding customers," comments Bryan Lanser, VP of Product Development at Muse Research and Development. "The incredible data throughput coupled with the fact there are no moving parts in these drives is just one more way in which we can make the RECEPTOR 2 the ultimate synth, sampler, and sound module more powerful and more reliable."

RECEPTOR 2: Road proven and now virtually indestructible
Many of the world's biggest bands and most famous artists use RECEPTOR 2 to run their synths, samplers, and effects both in the studio and on the road. That's because RECEPTOR 2 packs massive amounts of power into a 2-rack space box that weighs only 18 pounds. The addition of optional SSD technology to RECEPTOR 2 not only improves the performance of any RECEPTOR 2, but it also offers reduces the weight of the product as well as drastically improving the mechanical ruggedness of the product since the drive subsystem has no moving parts.