Which has the best native FX - Mixtreme or Pulsar II?

[Chadwick]

I\'m choosing between the Soundscape Mixtreme and Creamware Pulsar II cards with onboard DSP.

IS anyone able to give an opinion on which has the best integrated FX?

I suppose the most critical and difficult to get right is the reverbs.

I know the Pulsar has a 32 channel mixer instead of 16, and soft synths, but the FX are important.

Thanks ,
Rick

[John Matrix]

I haven\'t heard the Pulsar II dsp, which is probably more powerful (longer delays / reverbs) since it is a newer processor.

If money\'s not an object you can install 4 Mixtremes in one pc which will add the power of 4 Motorola dsp processors or wait for the \"Mixpander\" dsp only pci card - rumours say it will have 6 Motorolas on-board.

Regarding the Wave Mechanics Reverb quality on my Mixtreme, I am very much content. But the best plug-in is supposed to be the TC Reverb (www.tcelectronic.com), which shares algorithms with their studio reverb units - more expensive.

Has anyone listened to both cards?

[Deep White]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by John Matrix:
...or wait for the \"Mixpander\" dsp only pci card - rumours say it will have 6 Motorolas on-board.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Wow! How soon then, according to the rumors, will this card be released? I can\'t wait! I really need more than 1 reverb from Mixtreme....

Deep White

[LHong]

Dear Chadwick, Deep White and someone who are interested in many ways of expansions, otherwise just simply ignore it,

Whether Pulsar or Mixtreme is the professional way in digital recording studio systems if you can afford. More flexible, your hardware won\'t never be a limited. Later on if you still won\'t be happier, just simply add the external digital mixer and/or external effect processing...many many ways without upgrade your PC. It is a huge of saving/spending money here (save on PC and spend on expansions). The very first thing that you need to prepare is to make sure you could afford two of Mixtremes or Pulsars (ThreePlus is best).
Mixtreme and Pulsar have huge of supporting at third party effect plug-in FX like TC Reverb for mixtreme can be used on the pulsar, I guess, a lot of VST plug-in as well...Damn it, they want to steal your money badly...Sorry, maybe I just scare you a bit.
BTW, I\'m thinking to get both, mixtremes and Pulsars in same PC, just for fun, might be a soundcard-collector ($350~$400 for mixtreme is not bad deal). If you can wait about 2~3 weeks, I could tell you exactly how it works.

Just a reference,
LHong




[This message has been edited by LHong (edited 08-06-2000).]

[elle]

Lhong can you point me to a $350 Mixtreme card?

[John Matrix]

Hi Deep White,
my local Soundscape agent told me this some months ago, and anticipated a price close to $ 3000 - I hope you are not disappointed now.

[LHong]

=========================================
Lhong can you point me to a $350 Mixtreme card?
=========================================
Sorry, my friends, $350~$400 for the DEMO card from Guitar-Center, it\'s not on-sale, same price at everywhere about $479.95 + Tax and shipping fee.

[Deep White]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=\"1\" face=\"Verdana, Arial\">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by John Matrix:
Hi Deep White,
my local Soundscape agent told me this some months ago, and anticipated a price close to $ 3000 - I hope you are not disappointed now.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I don\'t understand! 6 DSPs cost $3000? That means 1 cost $500? Then it also means that the DSP on the Mixtreme card costs more than anything else on the card?

I\'ll caculate what a 6-DSP expansion can do and see if it\'s worth &3000. If it gives me eq and compressor on each track along with 3 or 4 TC Reverbs, and allows me to send the final mix directly to the TC Dynamizer for mastering, without mixing the project to 2-track first, I might still consider it.

Deep White

[This message has been edited by Deep White (edited 08-08-2000).]

[Deep White]

Hi LHong,

I\'m very interested with Pulsar/Scope. Can you tell me more about it? Like:

1. I saw on the Creamware website that Scope has 15 DSPs and Pulsar got 4. Does that mean Scape is the deluxe version of Pulsar? or they are made to do different things?

2. Is Pulsar II out now? and how does it compare to Pulsar/Scope?

3. Is it true that Pulsar eats a lot of computer resource when it\'s loaded? And does that cause any trouble?

Thanks & Regards,

Deep White

[LHong]

The answers as follows:
1> Scope, Pulsar, Powersampler, SRB, Luna, Elektra are same Pulsar/scope family architure design. It maens you can have any combination for the expansion and its DSP power is determined by amount of SHARC-DSP on-board, you could expand the DSP\'s power to it when you need to. The Scope is a top hi-end product (15-DSP, Max 24 I/O, about $5,000), second hi-end is PulsarII (6-DSP, 20-28 I/O $1,300) and the new one just came out to market is Luna 2496 (3-DSP, Max 36 I/O ~$900). My opinion, the Pulsar II is good choice for the Giga and best seller for Creamware now.

2> Pulsar II has been available in May, 2000.

3> Simple answer is NO. The Pulsar software release V2.0 seems be problems in OS but then the V2.01 upgraded-path are very stable now, Just like a mixtreme there are some system optimization need to be done to best taking advantage of DAW system (including in the user manual). A PIII or Athlon 500Mhz with 256Mhz should be better than enough for Cakewalk/Logic/Cubase + Gigastudio + Pulsar, to run all programs side by side without any problems.
I found the Pulsar doesn\'t use much PC resourse as the Cakewalk-SEQ does if you don\'t use the pulsar\'s built-in sampler (AKAI-S1000). For Us it should be fine because we are having the Gigastudio (no need the pulsar sampler).

Of course the pulsar is one of the most complexity DSP cards, be prepared some learning time issue, it is the best soundcard I\'ve ever had which is would be working with the GigaStudio at truly 32 output channels. I think you are mixtreme\'s owner, you have known how important it is.
Don\'t forget some other professional must pay about up $250,000.00 for the completed DSP-DAW-systems. See this SITE: http://www.dspmedia.com/ (\"http://www.dspmedia.com/\")

Hope this helps,
LHong



[This message has been edited by LHong (edited 08-08-2000).]

[Deep White]

Thanks for the info. But I still got the following questions:

1. Scope\'s got 1.5 times more DSP than Pulsar II, but the price is 2 times more - with less I/Os. Is there anything else that Scope can do and Pulsar can\'t besides more DSP and I/Os?

2. I don\'t remember who said that (a post in this forum): Mixtreme has onboard memory and Pulsar doesn\'t, thus the latter having to use the host computer\'s RAM. Is this true? and if it is, how does it affect the performance?

3. Also, from another post I don\'t remember by whom, people say that the DSP used on Mixtreme and Pulsar are different and thus the power of the latter is not 4 times than the former. Can you tell me more on this subject?

I\'m not a Mixtreme defender. I\'m just a musician that can\'t resist great sound and any bit of the pleasure during creating it. That\'s why I want to know about Pulsar II. I also got words from Soundscape that there\'s gonna be a deluxe version of Mixtreme (like Scope is to Pulsar I) so I guess I\'ll wait until it comes out, and in the meantime, gather as much information as I can.

Deep White

[LHong]

Answer your questions:
1> Good questions, I don\'t own the Scope, wished to get one if I could afford. Truth is Scopes can do what pulsars can\'t do in Audio test equiqments like third-harmonic-distortion measurement and audio-spectrum-analizer (for developers use), might be a huge of software development behind it. In additional it has built-in 32MB of SDRAM which is provided better in effect-processing like depth in time delay for example (pulsar doesn\'t have it). However, in audio-recording system, Creamware recommends to use three pulsar II (18 DSPS) instead of the single Scope board to get better functionality and I/O. That why you might see the price is a big difference, I guess (the best way, you might want to talk to Creamware). About the I/O, the Scope has 24 ADAT (principle), Pulsar II only has 16 I/O-ADAT+SPDIF+Analog= 20 I/O, other 8 I/O (ADAT) would be a future expansion about $250~$400 more (not available yet).

2> You are right, but it\'s not quite, pulsar II doesn\'t have huge of SDRAM like SCOPE does, but I can tell you a bit about the hardware is designed on the Pulsar:
Pulsar is designed to use the ADSP-21065L (Anlog Devices SHARC it\'s \"Super Harvard ARchiture Computer\") which is also built-in the Dual-ports memory of 544 kbit and additional of 1MBit-SRAM x2 on the pulsar-PCB (Toshiba, hi-speed TC55V1664J-12 SDRAM). I have no idea why people keeps saying that pulsar doesn\'t have SDRAM. About performance, I think that Scope is better, maybe it is good enough for Us? Don\'t forget, Pulsar/Scope has huge of supporting from third party developers (about 15 companies). See the www.creamware.com (\"http://www.creamware.com\") on the Pulsar and 3rd party support SITE. For instance, a good reverb about $100-$250 from TC-TIMEWORK. (an External like Lexicon via SPDIF would works too).
One more thing I know about pulsar II is because of latest designed, pulsar II has better latency, it\'s about 1ms@96khz and 3ms@44.1/48khz (Scope and pulsarI has about double time worse of latency)

3> You are right, \"4 times of DSP, it\'s not quite correct\" The way the DSP\'s power is being used which is depended on each elements in the Pulsar projects since Pulsar has built-in the huge of digital 32x16x2 mixer with 4-band-Par-EQ for each of 32 channels (you can disable, or use other mixer devices when you need better performance), it might wastes a lot power here which is compared to the Mixtreme only has 16x16x2 channel mixer. Therefore, I can say Mixtreme has about 75% DSP power compare to the pulsar I (50% with pulsar II), I guess. The comparison above is based-on the information I got from Chris@SoundCrape (not from Creamware), so I\'m not sure that Creamware would be happy with this!

Hope this answers that what you want to know,
LHong


[This message has been edited by LHong (edited 08-08-2000).]