Pulsar I quality compared to todays standard!

[Fevre]

hello

I have a Pulsar I plus (xlr) card in a 2,4 Ghz PC. I am considering switching to MAC and logic 8 (instead of Qbase). But my card does not fit in a MAC. The question is: How good is my Pulsar I card these days? Has it been overtaken a hundred times by todays audiocards that cost almost nothing or will I feel no improvements compared to new (I'm talking mere soundquality here, not software?)

And if anyone has more general views on the switching from PC to MAC or from Cubase to Logic, let me know!

Thank you so much
Fevre
www.henrikfevre.dk

[garyb]

as an audio card, except ofr the 13ms minimum latency(second generation cards and most other new cards go to 3ms and less), you pulsar is superior to most cards on the market.

[hubird]

I use two macs, ADAT /Midi connectioned through a RME interface in the OSX mac
no need for another soundcard, there's nothing better for the mony!

[astroman]

regarding VSTIs you're right Stardust, but as long as the sh*t still sound like sh*t it doesn't really matter.
Played my bass through the IK Multimedia Ampeg Simulation yesterday - what a marvellous program ... and what a crappy sound, it's a true pity

cheers, Tom

[hifiboom]

regarding VSTIs you're right Stardust, but as long as the sh*t still sound like sh*t it doesn't really matter.
Played my bass through the IK Multimedia Ampeg Simulation yesterday - what a marvellous program ... and what a crappy sound, it's a true pity

cheers, Tom

glad, we share that same opinion.

[Fevre]

Thanks for your help. Does the last two replies indicate that the soundcard is crappy? I don't quite understand. Nevertheless, I never had trouble with latency, so that's ok.

Any views on Cubase/PC vs. Logic/MAC?

Fevre

[astroman]

sorry for the confusing sidenote...
I also have a Pulsar One, 3 to be precise and the sound is just excellent
...but there is a relatively high Asio latency, which indeed becomes a problem when you use a VST amp emulation with a real bass or guitar. It s*cks.

on the other hand the 'tone' of these native amp emulations is so bad that one wouldn't want to use them anyway.
It becomes immediately obvious when switching channels, i.e. by sending the sound that feeds the emulation to the monitors.

The IK Multimedia Ampeg emulation is a great program - it just sounds... limited, hollow, strange. It is a very good attempt in the native world, or rather it even excels in it's domain...
But a DSP version as we are used to would simply eat it for breakfast. Burbs.

I would fall on my knees for a Scope version covering the same range of amps and cabinets. Put it in a metal case, supply switches and make it the ASB
the Authentic Stomp Box
sorry couldn't resist

anyway, such an emulation on your (or my) old Pulsar One would outperform any 192 khz 24 bit card on the market. Definetely

cheers, Tom

[lagoausente]

Recording midi by sofware is shit. Midi timing is vary bad, in the best case, unless you use quantizing.
i think you must not consider the Scope as a soundcard. I consider it like a: hardware mixer+hardware sampler+hardware synths+Amp simulator+soundcard+ etc etc, all-in-one little card.
Regarding to the "sound quality" , you are wrong on any of the ways. The only way to get a better "pro" , is to get a good external AD converter, and a good preamp, and put in to the SPDIF input of the Scope.
whatever new souncards are on the market, no much diferences are about "sound quality". That requires spend high $ on AD converters and preamps, or Do it your self that.

[sunset070]

I have see bad things with logic 7.1 of my friends and lap top power mac:
Play whit guitar rig in one track and put in the master tools for mastering the latency add and guitar rig result no playable,this with scope no succed or no succed like no playable instruments,the latency of scope card is very good,I play gutar rig and put in the mixer of scope and master more effext withyout udible latency,I if are my friend put logic 7 in the recycle ;=)

sorry for my english

[astroman]

Recording midi by sofware is shit. Midi timing is vary bad, in the best case, unless you use quantizing.

yes, I've made the same observation regarding 'drifting' midi timing.
I'm almost certain it is due to high CPU load by the graphics engine used in Scope. If I do some graphic interaction in Scope (adjust a fader on the mixer f.e.) I can hear the midi timing drop and increase.

It's not exactly Scope's fault, as the midi protocol is 'unprotected' by the OS, so whatever happens on the surface may have an influence.
I'm not sure if a midi driver could be written in a way to circumvent this, even more as it's afiliated with the same wxwidget crap in Scope.
I call it crap because I recently had to find out that whenever I use Energy XT as an ASIO host, I get clicks on the Scope side, as soon as any GUI activity occurs.
Replaced the host - no more clicks - damn open source to**ers

cheers, Tom
(sorry for ranting)

[lagoausente]

Recording midi by sofware is shit. Midi timing is vary bad, in the best case, unless you use quantizing.

yes, I've made the same observation regarding 'drifting' midi timing.
I'm almost certain it is due to high CPU load by the graphics engine used in Scope. If I do some graphic interaction in Scope (adjust a fader on the mixer f.e.) I can hear the midi timing drop and increase.

It's not exactly Scope's fault, as the midi protocol is 'unprotected' by the OS, so whatever happens on the surface may have an influence.
I'm not sure if a midi driver could be written in a way to circumvent this, even more as it's afiliated with the same wxwidget crap in Scope.
I call it crap because I recently had to find out that whenever I use Energy XT as an ASIO host, I get clicks on the Scope side, as soon as any GUI activity occurs.
Replaced the host - no more clicks - damn open source to**ers

cheers, Tom
(sorry for ranting)

Look here: http://www.jay.fm/miditime/
There are two type of drivers, the windows midi drivers, and the native midi drivers of the souncard or midi interface.
One problem is that often, the sequencers don´t know what one is the correct to use and use any of them, and you see just only to select while you don´t know what one of both you are using.
The problem is that the windows midi drivers, follow a diferent internal clock of the pc that the native drivers (in some cases).
There is a tool to determine what one is the correct to use, and a guide of how to can see both drivers to be selected, (in cubase/nuendo I think).
But the worst thinkg is not this. I have done that in the past, and found the correct driver. It was ok, the wrong one gived a high midi jitter, with big errors, but the bad new is that the good one, even was quite estable, never recorded an event in the just same position. (I made the experiment, just taking the midi out, to midi in, and re-recording in a new track the midi events Cubase was playing. There is always an imprecision, and a random error of the event position, even is not as high as in the wrong driver.
If you read the web, you´ll realize that the way that the midi data comes into the computer makes it imposible to exist accuracy. Note that audio at for examples, 44.1 samples per second, has a clock of that speed.
Doesn´t matter when you are singing or playing the string of the guitar, the samples come all them into the pc, one sample after the other, even just with the soundcard noisefloor. So doens´t matter nothing, whatever latency you have on your Asio, samples are piled up, like bricks to make a wall, doesn´t matter if you are playing or not.
In midi, that´s not ocurr. There is no a clock in the sense as in digital audio. As you play an event on you keyboard, it travels to the pc, but if you not play, just a few bits of "midi messages" go to the pc, eventually. So the only real clock that exist to know "when the event entered" is used by the midi driver, looking at one of the internal mainboard clocks, seeing "what time is it", and then put the event that data, and so that posibtion, but , hell!!!, if the CPU is working in other thing, like you tell Astroman, and so making the grafics for a fader, the computer will leave the event waiting at the door, sometime, till the cpu is free, and go there, to "look what time did the event come", but is just a lie, the cpu, even is not very hardly charged, will be not all the time "looking at the midi input events", so what happends is that the time information that puts for each event, is not exactly the time the event arrived to the pc. So a midi jitter, or shifting, or whatever you want to name, always occur, even sometimes, with fast cpu is not dramatically perceptible, but makes recordings like if you were a little drunk. I had many times the feeling of me have a bad rithm sense.
Man..., once I bought my 3 Dsp card, and used the STS sampler, what a diference. Note that I just send the audio outputs to the sequencer. I forget totally midi, and use the sampler like If were a hardware sampler, just using the sequener like an audio tape recorder. what a diference!!, now the player (me) is sober, and the time variations are the natural of the player, not random, and the full feeling of the playing is captured in the audio track, just like when recording any other audio track.

I put one idea here, for developers. Scope probably has the posibility of a true "total precision midi driver". Think about Steinberg System link. There, the midi channels are send, on just the last bit of the 24 bit digital audio, from one machine to other.
It could be done the same on the Scope I think. On the pci board, the pci, would must be taking and mixing with the digital audio, just like in the system link does, and send a Asio track at 44.1khz, with the midi events "inside". It could be for example 1 bit at 44.1khz. That would give a real midi clock. But all this are just suposicions, I´m not sure if the internal arquitecture of the card, allow this processing.

[widy]

midi timing cubase:
it also depends on the setup in cuabe
audio priority low,normal,high and so on
i dont have the exact description of the cuabe manuel in mind .. but for short it means that.
set to low: priority gui midi audio
set normal:midi audio gui
high:audio midi gui

ant it also depends on the order of the tracks in the project
i alway use midi tracks ( midi -> scope ) at first of the
than midi ->vst
and at last audio tracks

for me this is ok ..for realtime work and
if i finish a track .. i only enable one midi and rerecord this to a audio track ( do this for all ) and than i start final mastering because in this stage i never change the track itself

lg widy

[Nebukadneser]

Miditiming in Cubase is rock solid on any Scope card. Remember to check "use system timestamp".

Neb

[lagoausente]

Miditiming in Cubase is rock solid on any Scope card. Remember to check "use system timestamp".

Neb

miditiming is not rocksolid on none computer. Read the web of the link.
I have setted up ok, my midi, the tool on that web tells you if you must check "time stamp" or not, depending of the souncard/mainboard you have.
If you just not believe me, you have it easy to check.
1-Draw some events on a midi track, quantize them, to can easily check the position visually.
2- send that midi track output to your souncard midi out (or midi interface).
3- conect with a midi cable, the midi output to the midi input.
4- Enable a midi track for recording from that midi input, and zoom it in.
5- Record.
6- Compare the position of the recorded eventes with the original.
7-Mute this recorded midi track.
8-Create another midi track, and make another recording,
9- compare, with some zooming you´ll find that on each recording, the events are not placed in the exact same position.
Than come and tell me ..., if your midi is so rock solid.

[hubird]

You don't need to record two tracks to test this
just a streight kick on each beat is enough...

[astroman]

to be more precise on my observation (further up)
it only gets sluggish under Win2K and probably (I don't have it) XP
under Win98 I'm not able to hear the timing drift...

cheers, Tom

[hifiboom]

I guess you talk about the hardware midi out, as the virtual midi2scope drivers are perfectly tight in my opinion.

cheers,
Boris

[astroman]

no, it's about sequencer source and destination, but for completeness I just checked the hardware ports with an external soundmodule as well.
Even when loading a device from disk and there was no disturbance in the track.

mind you - all those midi crashes due to 'active sensing' etc always happen under XP
I noticed the timing float with Band-in-a-Box, both with an external sound module and a sampler under Win2K.
It was really heavy 'wow-and-flutter' other wise I wouldn't have noticed...

cheers, Tom

[hifiboom]

the midi timing on the virtual scope midi sources is rock solid from my experience.

I can honestly say that my akai sampler had a much worse timing with multiple midi channels than the creamware cards.

I`ve never experienced any problems with scope synths adressed by the scope sequencer source.

Have you disabled midi thorugh in cubase to avoid midi loops, which may cause lags too?

[lagoausente]

Well, when there is a problem in the midi configuration, with the sequencer or the OS, the midi timing errors are big enough to can hear them without problem, simply the timing doesn´t fit and is much clear.
When all the midi setup is ok, the midi jitter is not much noticecable. You can play your keyboard, hear it, and feel satisfied with the result. That doesn´t mean that the timing error doesn´t exist. it maybe be small enough and maybe if your system is fast, maybe you would need to make a quite big zoom to measure the errors, usually the variation maybe be only some ms, maybe 4 to 8 ms. But there is not always a 4ms, or a 8ms, it varies, is a random unprecision. Maybe you can hear the recorded track as fine. But if you record the audio, you´ll like better. If you have some ability with the keyboard, will feel better with audio.
I have made the same test with the sts sampler. Look, I used audio waves instead midi events.
I sent the audio output to a trigger.(audio to midi). Toke that midi to STS input, and sent the STS audio output through Asio to the sequencer.
So it was: audio to midi. Midi to STS, then audio again.
The result is that there is no measurable variation. 0 ms, or something unmeasurable.
Maybe the result of 4-6 ms of midi jitter is can be good. 0 Ms is just perfect.
I would like any of you tell me, if the problem is Xp, or the sequencer, just tell me how midi time clock works, for example in Linux. Tell me about the technical way that the "timing" is registered on any computer, and on any sequencer. Till what I now, midi has not a clock it self like digital audio has. It just uses the pc internal clock, or cloks as reference of the time an even came up. And whaever the driver, OS, or sequencer are there, at my understanding, is not good techical way to work, and so unpresisions maybe occur, much noticecable, low noticecable, or very low noticecable, but not perfect. [/quote]