John Bowen Solaris Voice Expander now available

[t_tangent]

just saw that John Bowen posted this on the Solaris Facebook group an hour ago.


Solaris Voice Expander Now Available - built in a 1U-sized cabinet, while not a full 19" width (and does not ship with 'rack ears'), the Voice Expander uses the same motherboard as the keyboard version, and adds another 10 voices of polyphony when using Poly Chain. (Just make sure both units have the same Program data on their CF cards!). You can also just layer it with your current Solaris. All parameters are connected to a Solaris front panel (via SysEx) for easy editing. Sales and production are handled by Sonic Core. Please contact Sonic Core at office@soniccore.de for more information.[*]

[SilverScoper]

https://www.johnbowen.com/purchase.html

[astroman]

Thanks for bringing this up... though I can‘t afford the unit, I enjoyed the interview video.
Reminded me at 2007 Frankfurt fair, when I had the opportunity to fiddle with the Solaris prototype for half an hour.
I‘m happy to hear the Solaris story continues for John and his team...

[valis]

Talked to John about this last night. About $2k USD currently with the exchange rate, would love to swap to an Xite unit and add this to the Solaris. Considering selling some of my gear that has appreciated tremendously (as much as I love my FS1R, it's literally an investment now at the prices it's getting).

[Spielraum]

... I love my FS1R...

and he can do a lot of fun with the right controller

kleiner Taschenrechner

Yamaha FS1R Controller.JPG (45.96 KiB) Viewed 13310 times

[t_tangent]

... I love my FS1R...

and he can do a lot of fun with the right controller
Yamaha FS1R Controller.JPG

That looks very cool Spielraum

[dante]

I‘m happy to hear the Solaris story continues for John and his team...

+1

[nebelfuerst]

Sorry for my stupid question, but what is die main difference between the solaris synth in scope and the standalone versions ?
Completely different, just similar names ? Identical sound engines ?

[astroman]

The Scope Solaris was (of course) the source for the hardware design.
But you could call it „completely different“ as well. So many changes and optimizations, a lot of particular coding for the new Sharc chip versions.
John himself addresses exactly this topic in the video below, but unfortunately (at least here) you can‘t position on the timeline, it‘s rather far from the beginning. The interview covers John‘s synth career right from the beginning.
https://youtu.be/NJQrTiCezvo

From my memory:
the engine is designed in 96khz throughout, takes advantage of the new Sharc‘s SIMD, a lot of code rewritten or custom.
Afaik (or guessing) the Scope Solaris doesn‘t take advantage of these features if run on Xite, so it‘s probably kind of „locked“ to the 6 compatibility Sharcs... which is rather the minimum for simple Solaris patches.
According to John the investment in a classic Scope system would at least equal the price of the current hardware to match performance.
And of course (in Scope) you‘d miss the great user interface of the multiple display/dial hardware.
Tbh operating the big Zargs with just a mouse is close to torture...

[valis]

You can certainly link to a time, you simply append ?t=TTTT (where T equals the time position in seconds):
https://youtu.be/NJQrTiCezvo?t=2394

[astroman]

Probably... but it didn‘t let me move the marker to find the time. Always jumped back to the beginning
(generally this works with other videos)

[valis]

Did I get it close enough? Just trying to help.

[astroman]

Yes, I know that feature. But it‘s probably due to my iPad running IOS12.
The video is 1h2min and it stalls dragging too often on the timeline. Just tried it again, 3 or 4 moves were ok and then it loses track and will not recover. Sorry for the mess.

[valis]

It's the compression level they're downloading at. With full frames (not subframe data) too far apart, the indexing falls apart and it can't rebuild the full video past a certain point. Might be iPad related, but it's more likely the video has been re-encoded on YT's end a few times and it's causing issues.

[nebelfuerst]

Thanks for the link to the video.

BTW:On my PC I have no problem to jump to any position/any second in the video.

[astroman]

Thanks Valis for the explanation, it seems to happen when skipping backwards after some forward moves.
No big deal, with „fresh memory“ it can be cured.

[valis]

That's exactly the behavior you would expect from a poorly indexed file. I think there's a way to report videos for technical (not content) related concerns, and they resubmit the originals to their processing queue (or something to that effect).