Receptor and ProTools HD

[mikecrehore]

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At our studio, we have four rooms running ProTools HD systems. They all run on the last of the G4 Dual machines and are full with their allocated ram. We do mainly recording and mixing for outside clients, but are branching into composition as well. In an effort to have a system that can be taken to any room for composing purposes, plugged in and then moved at a moments notice to another room if a client booking occurs, we are looking into a Receptor unit. Anyone willing to give me a quick pros and cons scenario to help with the decision?

Thanks in advance.

Mike Crehore
Co-owner, Dubway Studios
NY, NY
www.dubway.com (http://www.dubway.com)

[looneytunes]

Hi Mike,

I'm a bit biased (pro), but I think I can give you some useful info.

I have 2 Receptors, one of which is primarily devoted for Studio studio use, and one that is partially used in the studio - but mostly used for gigging. I tend to partition the systems and have mostly (processor-intensive) synths (and a few useful ROMplers) on the gigging Receptor. The Studio Receptor tends to have Large Sample Sets or Romplers (eg. BFD & Libs, Prominy LPC, EWQL Orchestra, RA, Colossus, Scarbee Vintage Keyboards, BelaD Sample sets, Ivory, ...). This is mostly an organization thing (in my mind), but it helps me in the studio to think of certain hardware pieces for certain musical responsibilities.

When considering multiple Receptors in a studio (with Pro Tools), you should consider digital syncronization and latency. Uniwire does seem convenient for reducing wiring, but it does have additional latency (2x audio buffer size). If you wish to always use digital transfers for both monitoring and recording, you may wish to forego Uniwire and stick with transfers via ADAT and SPDIF (which limits the number of channels to 4 (ADAT) + 1 (SPDIF) = 5 (stereo)). Also, if you do go with Uniwire, you will still need a word-clock to syncronize ProTools/Receptor - so you will need to use a SPDIF connection anyway. For Multiple Receptors, this means splitting the SPDIF signal, or using some kind of distribution device.

Alternatively, I often simply monitor the audio outputs of my Receptors during composition, and worry about transfer/syncronization towards the end of the song development as a non-realtime operation. This way, latency does not get in the way of the creative process. Also, Uniwire latency can be mitigated by plugin compinsation on the ProTools side during a transfer.

Some other issues:

I do tend to spend alot of time configuring Receptors with new SW, updates, and experimenting with (unsupported) plugins. This can be very de-stablizing - and in a studio environment, this may be the last thing you want when you have client bookings dependent on those machines. This is another reason why you might wish to have multiple Receptors, and partition these between stable and experimental environments.

An advantage of using uniwire is that it saves an entire Receptor Setup (eg program mappings, relative volumes, effect settings) as a 'single setting' (eg a single RTAS patch setting). Without Uniwire, you would probably wish to save everything as a Receptor Multi patch setting, and you might select the Multi from ProTools at the beginning of a song.

Having Receptor in a ProTools environment (especially when the PT DAW is not the most powerful machine) allows you a great way to run cpu intensive plugs and intensive disk-streaming plugs, without jeopardizing recording resources from PT.

OK hope these musings help.

Regards,
Kevin L

[mikecrehore]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the helpful advice. My partner and I run a full service studio environment focusing mainly on the recording and mixing our clients music- mostly live tracking (very retro, I know). However, we are both composers and although I have a setup at home, my partner does not. We want to be able to sneak into a room at a moments notice to flesh out ideas in the midi/virtual instrument environment with a few live guitar/bass/percussion overdubs and so this seems like a nice solution. I doubt if we will be doing much in the way of loading up experimental sounds and tweaking the Receptor that much. And we usually print any audio we have come up with to tracks anyway (old school), so the ADAT/SPDIF set up will be fine for us even with limited tracks.

Have you done any work with the VST to RTAS wrapper and receptor? I have used it successfully with other plugins in ProTools with good luck.

Thanks,

Mike C

[looneytunes]

Hi again Mike,

I had problems using the latest (1.1) uniwire plug with PTools. I even tried the FXPansion wrapper without luck. There was someone else who was able to get it to work by changing protections of the plug on the Mac (search for posts by 'bekenone' - you should be able to find his method). My PTools system is down awaiting a new mac, so I haven't been able to verify this solution just yet.

From what you are describing for your intentions, I might recommend Receptor with something like Kontakt and EW Colossus. Colussus is like a GM soundback with very high end samples, and would work well as a way to quick-spec ideas. It also works great if someone gives you a General Midi file, and you wish to refine it more with better sounds than a Roland GM sound module (or some other HW synth).

Anyway, So far Receptor meets my needs this way, which seems similar to your needs. Feel free to ask more questions.

Best Regards,
Kevin L

[mikecrehore]

Thanks Kevin,

I am sure I will be speaking to you again after we order one of these. I was thinking of the pre-loaded package of Receptor with Komplete 5. The NI stuff sounds pretty good. I will look into Kontact and EW as well.

Happy Holidays.

Mike C.

[looneytunes]

Seasons Greetings, Mike

Komplete will come with Kontakt, so you are all set there.

The older EastWest libraries run on Kontakt. Their new ones (like Goliath, a superset of Colossus) run on EastWest's own sample-playback engine.

I'm lurking away here, so feel free to shout-out questions!

Regards,
Kevin L