Sonic Core Scope platform (XITE-1). Significantly better than native plug ins?

[suthnear]

No. It was good for the time, but e.g. Minimax is certainly not as accurate a model as monark or diva. I have never run them side by side, but I have a bunch of minimoog reference samples that minimax wasn't able to get that close to (in fact, the pro 12 did better in one or two cases), whereas the latter two get much closer. And as far as general analogue sounds are concerned, I definitely preferred an atc-x to either the pro12 or the minimax for most things. The included effects were mostly very average sounding a decade ago (although a couple of third party reverb devices from sonic time works were fantastic) so they certainly wouldn't hold up well today, I am sure.

Of the third party devices, John Bowen's Solaris would probably be closest to what you are looking for. I didn't ever get it because I didn't like the interface and I didn't have enough DSP to do it justice anyway. Sonically, it didn't add that much to what could be accomplished via the modular. The modular was mostly great, but it was very unstable. Loading or editing patches sometimes locked up the cards and this would require a reboot of the PC. Also, it didn't save patches properly sometimes and I could never figure out the cause. These two combined to make building large patches rather stressful and tedious. There was a very good set of third party modules called Flexor that were interesting. But the community of device builders was small even back then and could only have gotten smaller in the intervening period. There was little of the kind of creativity that you see in the reaktor user library.

The routing possibilities of the cards were staggering. It could have been an amazing system had it taken off and creamware had been able to support it properly. But there were two main problems for me: the first was the DSP they relied on. It was underpowered and the only way around this was to buy bigger and much more expensive cards. I didn't have an entry level system but I ran out of DSP all the time. The second problem was worse and what ultimately killed it for me: the system fell into a dead zone between the immediacy and gratification of hardware and the convenience and automatability of VSTs. When I switched from desktop machines to laptops I never missed it.

If you are really curious and have a machine with a PCI bus, get an old pulsar card off ebay (it'll be cheap these days) and see if the system floats your boat. You'll soon know if you want more power or just can't be arsed.

[suthnear]

Oh, you have no PCI bus (pays to read the thread properly). Scratch that idea, then. And reading kmonkey's post, I now also remember having had sample rate issues

And the minimax played polyphonically _definitely_ didn't sound like a memorymoog...

[zerocrossing]

Oh, you have no PCI bus (pays to read the thread properly). Scratch that idea, then. And reading kmonkey's post, I now also remember having had sample rate issues

And the minimax played polyphonically _definitely_ didn't sound like a memorymoog...

Looks like kmonkey's a known troll (found the threads on GS where the mod ended up deleting all his posts) and in all my research I did not find a single post mentioning instability in the Modular software. Maybe you're thinking about "Faxi Nadu's Modular Crash Course?"

[suthnear]

I wouldn't know about kmonkey - I just saw the post after I'd written mine - or anyone called faxi nadu. The modular was definitely unstable. Not drastically, but enough to be annoying...

[faxinadu]

gotta call bs on above post, the modular is stable. *flies away*

[zerocrossing]

gotta call bs on above post, the modular is stable. *flies away*

Hi Fax, I've already watched a few of your videos. Thanks for those!

The above is clearly trolling. I've got the XITE-1 all hooked up. Some driver install issue, but I'm sure I'll get it sorted. I'll try spending some quality time with it Monday.

[asksol]

I don't think that's the right way to think of it. From what I've been told DSP is different than CPU muscle. DSP is like a spoon. CPUs in PCs are like sporks. Think of digital audio as soup. Yeah, the spork will scoop it up, but not as well as the spoon because it has to have part of it's surface designed for other tasks.

I don't think this is a correct analogy. With modern PCs it's more like the signal processing is one bowl of soup, the OS is another bowl of soup and all of the other applications are different bowls of soup.

The CPU will have one spoon, and sequentially take a bit of each bowl (in some special cases it can do some things in parallel also), and some of the bowls will be shared between multiple CPUs/CPU cores.

No part of the CPU is dedicated to other tasks, they just have to share time.

If the CPU is as fast at processing all the bowls as the dedicated DSP CPU is at processing one, then there
cannot possibly be any difference in quality.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

Oh, you have no PCI bus (pays to read the thread properly). Scratch that idea, then. And reading kmonkey's post, I now also remember having had sample rate issues

And the minimax played polyphonically _definitely_ didn't sound like a memorymoog...

Looks like kmonkey's a known troll (found the threads on GS where the mod ended up deleting all his posts) and in all my research I did not find a single post mentioning instability in the Modular software. Maybe you're thinking about "Faxi Nadu's Modular Crash Course?"

man not cool. Now this comes from someone who has had real personal problems over the years with kmonkey, and i can ASSURE you, he is not a troll. He owns a lot of gear and is very passionate about all this stuff and I know he is really into hardware and also dedicated dsp stuff like powercore/scope etc.

Just because a moderator banned him or deleted his posts, whatever, doesn't make him a toll overall.

I know for a fact both main mods hate my guts here and backstab me in threads that have no relevance to me (and threads i haven't even had any posts in LOL), so what, that automatically makes me a troll too? Cause the mods never agree with my point of view?

Anyway i can't find a single thing in kmonkey's posts in this topic that come across as "troll like". It just seems like useful information to me about his personal experience with scope, and is actually on topic to your opening post.

[murnau]

Oh, you have no PCI bus (pays to read the thread properly). Scratch that idea, then. And reading kmonkey's post, I now also remember having had sample rate issues

And the minimax played polyphonically _definitely_ didn't sound like a memorymoog...

At least some can try a PCIe to PCI interface card which didn't cost much and if it not working properly just send it back.

[Gadget Fiend]

I had a Scope system around 15 years ago. It wasn't worth the trouble back then and certainly isn't now given how much more powerful computers have become and how much better sounding (and more plentiful) native plugins are.

Basically, Scope is a dead platform. If you look at the list of instruments and effects available, most of these were developed over 10 years ago (and didn't sound that great even then).

If you want sonic diversity and better sound quality, hardware synths are your best option. Why not use the money from the Prophet 12 to buy the following synth modules:

Waldorf Microwave II (~$350)
Roland JD-990 (~$350)
Korg EX-8000 (~$400)
Ensoniq ESQ-M (~$300)

So for under $1,500 you can buy 4 classic, great-sounding synths that will fit in an 8-space rack. This will give you more variety and WAY more polyphony than a Modal 002R.

[trimph1]

I had a Scope system around 15 years ago. It wasn't worth the trouble back then and certainly isn't now given how much more powerful computers have become and how much better sounding (and more plentiful) native plugins are.

Basically, Scope is a dead platform. If you look at the list of instruments and effects available, most of these were developed over 10 years ago (and didn't sound that great even then).

If you want sonic diversity and better sound quality, hardware synths are your best option. Why not use the money from the Prophet 12 to buy the following synth modules:

Waldorf Microwave II (~$350)
Roland JD-990 (~$350)
Korg EX-8000 (~$400)
Ensoniq ESQ-M (~$300)

So for under $1,500 you can buy 4 classic, great-sounding synths that will fit in an 8-space rack. This will give you more variety and WAY more polyphony than a Modal 002R.

Those are right about what I need.

Thanks for the ideas!!!

[ghettosynth]

Waldorf Microwave II (~$350)
Roland JD-990 (~$350)
Korg EX-8000 (~$400)
Ensoniq ESQ-M (~$300)

So for under $1,500 you can buy 4 classic, great-sounding synths that will fit in an 8-space rack. This will give you more variety and WAY more polyphony than a Modal 002R.

None of those are bad synths. I really wanted a JD990 back in the day, I still have my JD800. I've had DW8000s several times, great filter. I've never had a Microwave, but I do think that they're interesting and I still have an ESQ-1.

But I'm going to speak blasphemy here, given the choice of losing Reaktor and losing all that I still have, I wouldn't have to think for even a second. If I were going to spend $1500 on hardware, it wouldn't be those synths. I'd save a little more and get a P6 module. You won't have the polyphony, but it sounds great.

[ghettosynth]

I don't think the DSP in that units surpass Intel current offerings, so developers have more power for their algorythms at the x86 platform. More power= more detailed algorythms.

So I would go for the modal 002r without even thinking about it.

I don't think that's the right way to think of it. From what I've been told DSP is different than CPU muscle. DSP is like a spoon.

That's a super oversimplification that doesn't really say much. Parent is largely correct modulo equivalent throughput and no other real time issues. There's no intrinsic audio value to DSP processors. They are specialized so they have greater throughput at a given power efficiency, but that doesn't mean that they are intrinsically better at audio, it just means that they won't get as hot or run up your electric bill.

Figure 1 also shows that, in terms of size and power performance, x86 processors are not as efficient as DSPs. The x86 processor is designed for many different types of solutions, ranging from embedded and laptop to desktop and server versions. Higher-performance versions, which could compete with DSPs, require from 35W to 90W of power and often need a chipset that doubles the size of the design and requires another 15W to 20W. A high-end DSP or array processor requires from 2W to10W and does not require an additional chipset. This means that DSPs have an inherent efficiency edge of 2x in terms of size and 5x to 10x in terms of power. Even if the x86 CPU were to outperform the DSP or array processor in algorithm performance, it would still be far less efficient.

http://www.rtcmagazine.com/articles/view/100862

The problem is, this neglects economies of scale, so with respect to your pocketbook, x86 may be more efficient in terms of cost for the same level of processing power.

[spirit]

Had a PulsarII way back in the day. Great sound but had two huge problems: very poor polyphony and difficult to integrate. It just lacked the convenience of VST. So while the sound quality was better I kept going to VST for the pads and bouncing. The PulsarII could run one synth with decent polyphony (ie 8 - 10 voices) and that was it. Had great fun with it though - the modular was a blast, Prism was a bit Virus-like and the Pro One emulation was excellent. Real shame about that platform, full of might-have-been potential.

[Gadget Fiend]

Waldorf Microwave II (~$350)
Roland JD-990 (~$350)
Korg EX-8000 (~$400)
Ensoniq ESQ-M (~$300)

So for under $1,500 you can buy 4 classic, great-sounding synths that will fit in an 8-space rack. This will give you more variety and WAY more polyphony than a Modal 002R.

If I were going to spend $1500 on hardware, it wouldn't be those synths. I'd save a little more and get a P6 module. You won't have the polyphony, but it sounds great.

As I understand it, the OP is looking for a hybrid synth (rack or desktop) to replace his Prophet 12 keyboard. He wants something a bit more versatile than a pure analog synth.

Regardless, if I was going to spend $1,800 on an analog synth, it wouldn't be on the Prophet 6 module. I would get an MKS-80 (Rev 5). To my ears, it sounds better and has 2 more voices of polyphony.