Question: Do you want 4x scope on ExpressCard/PCIe?

[thehe]

Nice alternative to magma actually ...

a lot cheaper i think

[the19thbear]

Looks really interesting!
I just have to get scope to work with pro tools somehow, and then i might get one of your boxes!!

[bosone]

not as cheap as i imagined, but actually an interesting price.
I could make the investment if it is proven useful (high masterverb test) in the future, also because it would grant me another 10 years of scope fun!

go on and keep us updated!

[the19thbear]

Is there any way to get it working via usb? (maybe multiple ports)
im thinking:
the signal is converter form pci to PCIe, but could we have an optional USB thingy?
I know the bandwith will suffer ALOT! But it would be great if i had acces to my scope cards on the go, just for recording - not for big projects with reverb etc - just maybe 8 channels of audio via adat, and one tiny mixer.
Would that be possible?

[thehe]

Is there any way to get it working via usb? (maybe multiple ports)
im thinking:
the signal is converter form pci to PCIe, but could we have an optional USB thingy?
I know the bandwith will suffer ALOT! But it would be great if i had acces to my scope cards on the go, just for recording - not for big projects with reverb etc - just maybe 8 channels of audio via adat, and one tiny mixer.
Would that be possible?

USB will be the bottleneck of bottlenecks... should be skipped right NOW - by the way: USB uses chunked transfer; firewire streaming think about the early usb-days where only FW-soundcards were produced - this is the reason -- so, maybe with a great USB3 chipset we can... but there is expresscard, as i told you via PM.

Greetings

[thehe]

Ok guys...

some news:
Got additonal 45 DSP in 3 Cards.
They won't work together with a Luna II - so the euphemism was broken...
When I tried MasterVerbs with the four Cards installed (3x 15+Luna) it was possible to load a lot more than 25 Masterverbs - but no output - nothing... After some playing with Sample-Rate and connections a box popped up and said, that there is an inavalid S/TDM... after some measurements i decided to pull off the fourth card - all works great but:

i only get to load 10 MasterVerb's without warnings in 44,1/16.

not the best result for this bunch of hardware?

- I'm currently unsure, if the external controller or my Dual-Processor Mainboard is the problem - i will try that setup with my intel this week and report the progress...

Greetings,
Robin

[next to nothing]

If you get 10 MVs running you shouldn't be disappointed Of course more is better but i think most people will find that performance satisfactory. Good idea to test it with another system though, to check for variations.

I think maxing up with 3 cards will not be a showstopper as long as they get a good performance 3-card system

Keep up the good work!

[garyb]

yes, being able to use 3 card and get 10 masterverbs is quite good and quite usable!

[HUROLURA]

Maybe, the number of board can be raised to 4 but then you have to use smaller board then.

I read once here that a 3 Scope Pro system (3x15 DSP) and a 2 Scope Pro (14/15 DSP) + 1 Scope Project (6DSP) system do not provide very different performance. Hence sharing data calculation between DSP involve exchanging data betweeen the DSP, so performance increase cannot be linear with DSP number increase and kind of saturate on big DSP system.

But your solution could also be usefull to setup a system with 4 smaller board .
- A gang of 4 Luna would provide the equivalent DSP power of 2 Scope Project.
- A gang of 1 Scope Project + 3 Luna would be equivalent to 1 big Scope Pro
- A gang of 3 Pulsar + 1 Luna woould also provide something similar to 1 Scope Pro

The trick could be the IO available on such systems

And once again, it could be quite a good way to recycle old small cards.

[thehe]

can totally agree here - if you spend ~300EUR for a external box with laptop-connector etc. you have a good and powerfull recording solution or a really nice hardware or effect unit - the cards are simply to cool to put into trash.

we should see i'll try a lot of different configurations in the next days and provide some results - maybe some statistical data...

greetings

[YISH313z]

Any new news with this?

[sethius]

Me too, how is it going?

[vascomusic]

here's another 4 x PCI box

http://www.cooldrives.com/1popcto4xpci.html

No PLX PEX8111 or PEX8112 PCIe-to-PCI bridge chipset on the PCIe host card as far as i can discover.

[HUROLURA]

Yep, but probably too small.
- 14/15 DSP and 6 DSP cards wouldn't fit
- maybe a 3/4 DSP combo could fit but this would mean 9 to 12 DSP max ...

Could be nice for recycling small boards (if it works) but then why not building a small old-spec PC with a not that fast CPU just to run this unit as a satellite sub-system ...

[bosone]

@HUROLURA
the idea of having 2 computer, the main one and a second old PC with the scope system is totally unpractical for me...
you should switch with a moniotr/mouse/keyb swithc between the 2 PC each time you have to edit something in the pulsar environment, then go back to the main pc in which you have the sequencer, for example...
better keep everything on the same PC (for me at least!)

[sethius]

@bosone

I agree, but unfortunately main computer is a MAC and until (and if!) sonic ports Scope the the MAC i'm pretty much screwed..!!

[Warner]

My main machine is an iMac running Pro Tools and the Scope is on an old G4 400. I use VNC to control Scope from the iMac. No problems there

[bosone]

VNC seems a good option!
i did not consider it

[YISH313z]

here's another 4 x PCI box

http://www.cooldrives.com/1popcto4xpci.html

This looks promising...In regards to the box being too small, I imagined that one could make a new box to put this in, no.

This gives me hope.

I think I shall order this soon

[thehe]

here's another 4 x PCI box

[...]
No PLX PEX8111 or PEX8112 PCIe-to-PCI bridge chipset on the PCIe host card as far as i can discover.

[...]

Dear vascomusic,

I think exactly this is what you DON'T want.
In my holy opinion, the Controller-Chip on my Exsys-Solution handles the IRQ's for the Scope-Cards.
The board (mentioned in your post) looks only like a riser-card - your mainboard will handle IRQs and the other stuff and this will mainly result in conflicts. You all know, that IRQ-Conflicts will take down the hole SC-System.