PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Check the signature below for the hardware configuration. I just got a 2nd 13 slot Magma so now I'm running two 13 slot Magmas on this DAW. I've got 4 x UAD-1 cards in 13 slot Magma #1 with the host card in mobo PCI #4 with the UAD-1 cards in Magma PCI slots #1, 5, 8 and 12. All 4 x UAD-1 cards are sharing IRQ 19 and no other device is sharing IRQ 19. The host card for 13 slot Magma #2 is in mobo PCI #3 and the 3 x Pulsar cards are in Magma PCI slots #1, 5 and 11 and they are all sharing IRQ 18 and not sharing with any other device. Also, there are some more wacked out possibilities with this system since in this 2nd chassis, PCI slot #10 is on IRQ 17 and so is mobo PCI slot #2 and this IRQ is only shared with the LAN card which can be disabled so, in theory, could be used for another Pulsar in the Magma or a PCI Firewire card...............sorta' thinking Duende here, I imagine that my PCI bus would likely scream for mercy......but who knows???...........I've been very successful so far with this configuration. It is extremely stable with no crackles or pops so this definitely needs to be explored at some point.

One other thing about this 2nd Magma is that it is one of the newer variety with the round cable and the external host card will accept the Magma PCIe adapter. Since the PCIe bus has *much* more bandwidth, it should handle more Pulsar cards, sooooo....... in the future I will likely be upgrading to a PCIe mobo and if you guys will loan me 10 Pulsar cards, I'll load them up with my three cards and see if I can get 13 cards working in a Magma on the PCIe bus!!!!!!

pretty cool...

It would be really interesting to ses how those Magna's go with the ExpressCard controller too....

Too much power for one single person... are you from NASA???
What hell of production requires 3 SCOPE + 4 UAD?!
I'm fully satisfied with my 2 UAD & 2 SCOPE (pro+lunaII), and the average DSP usage is below the 50-60%...

Note: all synths are from another external PC rack with 2 PulsarII +1 Pulsar1 linked via FXteleport, and a lot of native VSTi. Same DSP/cpu usage below 60-70%...

Anyway, good experiment!

two magma wow,I want purcase magma for use with one laptop bat I have in my daw 3 scope card and work like god

see my daw here

http://digilander.libero.it/sunset070/daw.htm

Hehe thats DJ if you guys don't know him by now let this be an example of a genius guy who ngoes beyond the obvious the simplest and the most comfortable.
He is a source of experimentations and solutions and is highly regarded as a good friend of mine although we have never met in person and that is the beauty of internet !!
Dear DJ can you try if you can have 4 pulsar cards on same computer ?
Officially Creamware does not support this but I am sure it can be done.
Someone can consider the fourth card as a in/out option only so a luna 3dsp would do and have this last in the row as configured from cset.ini.
Regards DJ,
Dimitrios

musurgio wrote:Hehe thats DJ if you guys don't know him by now let this be an example of a genius guy who ngoes beyond the obvious the simplest and the most comfortable.
He is a source of experimentations and solutions and is highly regarded as a good friend of mine although we have never met in person and that is the beauty of internet !!
Dear DJ can you try if you can have 4 pulsar cards on same computer ?
Officially Creamware does not support this but I am sure it can be done.
Someone can consider the fourth card as a in/out option only so a luna 3dsp would do and have this last in the row as configured from cset.ini.
Regards DJ,
Dimitrios

Hey Dimitrios,

I'll definitely be giving this a try as soon as I get a few more mixes out the door. I sort of got behind in my work while reconfiguring my systems and waiting for some of the Pulsar components and some other stuff. Also, I could use 3 x more ADAT I/O on this system. That would allow me to interface with another Paris MEC and expand my mix platform from 40 to 56 tracks.

erminardi wrote:Too much power for one single person... are you from NASA???
What hell of production requires 3 SCOPE + 4 UAD?!
I'm fully satisfied with my 2 UAD & 2 SCOPE (pro+lunaII), and the average DSP usage is below the 50-60%...

Note: all synths are from another external PC rack with 2 PulsarII +1 Pulsar1 linked via FXteleport, and a lot of native VSTi. Same DSP/cpu usage below 60-70%...

Anyway, good experiment!

Actually I've got a good friend who works for NASA who reverse engineered some discontinued DAW hardware that I needed and then built a modified version of it that was much improved. I still use this component every day. He also designs and builds recording studios and teaches electrical engineering at a University in Houston. Love those NASA guys. They are lots smarter'n me

The reason I have such a large Scope system is because I'm interfacing it with and slaving it to a second DAW with 70 digital I/O that I use for summing. It's pretty involved, but it works very nicely this way for my purposes and the Scope platform is the most stable I've ever used when interfaced with the other DAW in this way. I'm very pleased with it.........but it's so damned stable that I'm bored to death. Everything works and so now I need to try to see if I can get this Scope DAW to grow a little so I can feel some pain.

i found the dj setup interesting, but at the same time i think it could be done in a less expensive way, especially for an home studio.
How is the masterverb benchmark and how is the added latency by several instances of uad plugins ? (just curiosity)

erminardi wrote:Too much power for one single person

I don't think DJ can be stopped now

djmicron wrote:i found the dj setup interesting, but at the same time i think it could be done in a less expensive way, especially for an home studio.
How is the masterverb benchmark and how is the added latency by several instances of uad plugins ? (just curiosity)

It absolutely could be done in a less expensive way, but not if interfacing to another DAW in the way that I want. Believe me, I looked at every option.......however, it could be easily be done in a *more* expensive way by using Pulsar Pro cards instead of Pulsar II cards. If I was summing in Scope or Cubase it would definitely be less expensive..by a few thousand dollars.

My studio is in my home, but it's more along the lines of a commercial facility in many ways.

I don't know about the Masterverb benchmark because I'm not using it for mixing because I don't have enough leftover DSP once I have my routing matrix set up, though I do love it and plan to as soon as I have more DSP available. Right now I'm using Lexicon, Sony, Quantec and Roland outboard reverbs. As far as UAD-1 latency is concerned, it's not an issue because it is hosted in Cubase SX 3 and is automatically delay compensated by the application. For my purposes, Scope is more like an intermediate routing interface between Cubase and Paris with the panning and summing done in Paris. However, now that I have shorter STDM cables (I was using a very long one prior to getting this second 13 slot Magma and this was limiting my DSP availability), I have a bit more Scope DSP available which is nice during mixes. I think the Scope DSP is very high quality stuff.

Regards,

the Masterverb Benchmark was established because it's the reverb that comes with every Scope system today. Any quality reverb will put stress on the PCI bus even with no processing going on as it establishes a communication with the mobo Ram over that bus - the MV was choosen simply as a common denominator unit, so the results are comparable for everyone.

A good PCI throughput is also a solid base for good Asio performance.
The 'test' itself is quite helpful as PC retailers have (usually) absolutely no idea of what's required in theis context - they deal with gamer stuff in the first place.
I had to return a VIA KT133 board myself and they looked at me like an alien as I complained about 'horrible performance...'
... good to have a local reseller, btw

while Scope processing is (unquestionable) excellent, it simply cannot cover all and every flavour of reverb.
Masterverb, the STW 100 series, PT reverbs have a similiar basic sound color, nicely complemented by the DAS RMX160 with a (slightly) brighter (kind of silk-on-silk like) character.
Imho you can't continue the row (on Scope) as the basic Sharc sound would interfere.
I've recently added a native reverby by Arts Acoustic which in fact sounds like the perfect sequel for the row above

I guess you see your outboard gear in a similiar way, not all reverbs are created equal and one size doesn't fit all, contrary to Zappa.

cheers, Tom

For those of you new to Deej, he's a sick, sick man. I've been trying to get him help for quite some time.

Waiting for my Scope card . . . .

TCB

TCB wrote:For those of you new to Deej, he's a sick, sick man. I've been trying to get him help for quite some time.

Waiting for my Scope card . . . .

TCB

I think you many need to write one of those books of yours on this platform......I'll help by providing the material for the "do not try this at home" chapters.

Are you close to the Chicago Basin there?

scope4live wrote:Are you close to the Chicago Basin there?

Pretty close. We are in Hermosa, right across the road from Trimble Hot Springs. Chicago Basin is up the road a ways between here and Silverton.

DJ wrote:

djmicron wrote:i found the dj setup interesting, but at the same time i think it could be done in a less expensive way, especially for an home studio.
How is the masterverb benchmark and how is the added latency by several instances of uad plugins ? (just curiosity)

It absolutely could be done in a less expensive way, but not if interfacing to another DAW in the way that I want. Believe me, I looked at every option.......however, it could be easily be done in a *more* expensive way by using Pulsar Pro cards instead of Pulsar II cards. If I was summing in Scope or Cubase it would definitely be less expensive..by a few thousand dollars.

My studio is in my home, but it's more along the lines of a commercial facility in many ways.

I don't know about the Masterverb benchmark because I'm not using it for mixing because I don't have enough leftover DSP once I have my routing matrix set up, though I do love it and plan to as soon as I have more DSP available. Right now I'm using Lexicon, Sony, Quantec and Roland outboard reverbs. As far as UAD-1 latency is concerned, it's not an issue because it is hosted in Cubase SX 3 and is automatically delay compensated by the application. For my purposes

as astroman said, the masterverb test is a benchmark to compare the pci performance of your system with others.
To do it, open an empty project, it must be cleaned from every device and try to add a masterverb until you'll get a pci master overflow message and post here how many masterverbs you are able to open before getting the overflow message.

About uad, i know the latency is compensated by the host, but i'm curious, for example when opening several compressors instances if it is suitable for real time playing instruments from keyboards.

wow! are you saying with magma I could use 6 scope cards ?

how will this work ? 2 seperate scope enviroments with all 45 DPSs ?

Well,
Magma is not a computer inside computer.
Consider it as a PCI ports extender.
Instead of having "only" 4 or five (ore less with newer boards) pci slots you will have another 13 pci slots.
The pci overflow problem remains the same.
if you are able to work with four or five pulsar cards on your mainboard then the same applies for magma boards.
I would like to have an extra pulsar to try the 4 card thing to see if it appears in dsp count and in/out config.
Regards,
Dimitrios

More interesting than how much Masterverbs you can load in this setup, is how much traffic can be going on between Magma box and PCI bus...I've read on Planetz before that one card in a M. box works great, but the more cards or DSPs you have the more bandwidth is required...and not offered by a regular system
correct me if my suspicion is untrue.