PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

ARCADIOS wrote: anyway..... i feel fine at the moment with my old 20dsps.....
"at the moment"

Just what I thought before jumping in the new Xite world.

Regarding the figures I attempted to give, the idea was just to give some hints about the reason why the newer system bring performance increase.

The topic is much more complex than what rough MHz/MFlops calculation can bring and imply many other details and tricks.

Even the fact that we all have different workflow has some influence.

I felt since my very first LUNA board that I would always need some more DSP.
But this feeling could hold on for some time since the Xite-1 joined my team...
... well, untill we see a XTDM connector used to acheive expansion between severall Xite devices.

garyb wrote:latency really can't go lower without an unreasonable increase in the use of CPU resources. latency is all about giving the cpu time to complete all of it's tasks. the D is quite a better deal than the old pci cards were, dollar vs processing power, but the real plus is that the XITEs also sound quite a bit better than the old cards.

Could you please elaborate?

Throttler wrote:

garyb wrote:latency really can't go lower without an unreasonable increase in the use of CPU resources. latency is all about giving the cpu time to complete all of it's tasks. the D is quite a better deal than the old pci cards were, dollar vs processing power, but the real plus is that the XITEs also sound quite a bit better than the old cards.

Could you please elaborate?

yes, but in what way?

as far as value goes, an XITE-D is about $300 more than a 14dsp card, but it's 2 1/2 times the power. an XITE-1 is about the price of 2 1/2 14dsp cards, but it's 6-10 times the power of a 14dsp card, wplus it has a really good pair of mic pres with hiz inputs.

it's hard to elaborate about the sound. i would hope that it would suffice to say that the XITE is more transparent and has a much lower noise floor. in addition because all the dsps are on the same board and because there's less chance that a big device would have to span more than one dsp, there are less potential phase issues with an XITE.

the reason for latency is that the processor needs time to do it;'s calculations. the cpu does much more than hand the audio to the Scope card and receive it back again. even with multiple cores handling multiple threads, it can only do one thing at a time per core. for realtime work, that means doing a bit of a job, moving to the next job and so forth, hopefully arriving back at the first job before the time runs out for playback. if it's too late, you get a dropout. there is a physical limit to just how much work can get done.

i hope this helps...

Re the sound quality, its possible that the XITE's use later (updated) AD/DA converter chips than the PCI cards. This is what happened for example in the update from the original A16 to the A16MKII

I'll elaborate.............

I use nearfields and IEM's at home. Midfield and on occassion Long throws at the gig.
RME, EgoSys, M Audio, Receptors, etc. and other sound cards sound fine at home on the PC, etc.
At a gig though, those outputs are just not hot enough, or it's the combination of that, and the Native DAW sound that eminates from the back of the cabinet.......? I can't figure out why this is, but it's the case in every example I have ever tried.
Now play an Analog Synth, Scope DSP product, DSP Hardware synth, or even an Ancient Wurlitzer 200A and the sound eminates from the front of the cabinet, like a real instrument should....

I don't know the scientific reasons, and don't really care if it doesn't nullify, or what any of the little GUI tools say, I trust my ears.

I actually can compare this to front surface mirrors having a better qualtiy image than the regular mirrors we seem satisfied with until we get up close and see the double image and smeary overall definition.

garyb wrote:
yes, but in what way?

yes sorry for that, quality wise.

lower noise floor, I guess you are referring to ad/da's ?
phase issues, I understood, and really important in case of a big mixer.
transparency, again, I guess you are referring to ad/da's ?

yes, some is AD/DAs(noise floor, transparency), some is the XITE itself(noise floor again since the processors and signal paths are now outside the computer, improved phase coherence).

little things can equal a big improvement.

Thanx Gary, and great quote

garyb wrote:little things can equal a big improvement.