just got back from my little trip through Germany, which included the Musikmesse Frankfurt.
I first met with with a planetz member called emphazor in the morning, before we went to the Musikmesse on saturday.
After a little early morning beer in the middle area of the Messe-area
, and a short walk through the DJ stuff on ground floor (Hall 5.0), we found our way to the upper area, the hall 5.1, which housed the most interesting stuff.We did a short walkthrough 5.1 to get a quick overview of what is available at all, and ended up demoing the new Euphonix controller. Luckily a very friendly Euphonix employee gave us an indepth show of the new MC Mix and MC Control.
Indeed a very nice tool!
Later we found our way to the Soniccore booth, where we met Martin, aka MCCY and all people from the Soniccore team + John Bowen.
I was very impressed about the SC team, all very friendly and openminded. I really enjoyed the talk to everyone.
I was introduced to the keymaster himself, Mr. Ralf Bach, and the conversation after a short time was like two scope entusiasts meeting each other.
Ralf showed me all the new plug-ins coming with Scope v5.
- a new surround reverb which can be used also as stereo reverb, because you have single output strips... Ralf told me that its a new development not based on masterverb.
- a channel strip EQ based on new dsp algos, which sound different.
- further two new compressors, which are very simple to use, one comes with a gate
I think you basically already know these informations from other threads, what you may not know is that these new plug-ins are included in the v5 scope pack.
We didn`t really demo the devices, Ralf simply showed them to me, and finally such an event isn`t good for checking out the stuff in detail or audition them.
Altough I never had the feeling that loading times were a problem with v4.5 and the old scope cards, I was told that loading times would be faster with Scope v5 and XITE-1 also.
Ralf and me also talked about creamware history and the soniccore future. All I can say: things look very good indeed! It seems they are just warming up.
A bit later I was introduced to Klaus Piehl, Holger Drenkelfort and Jürgen Kindermann, all very pleasant personalities.
Klaus Piehl, the dsp developer and Jürgen Kindermann(hardware design) gave me some indepth infos about the new XITE hardware, from a more technical view: the SHARCS inside the box, memory handling, pci-express connection, and so on.
Very interesting and as an sdk owner, I am the type of guy who loves to get deeper infos about the technical things of the new box also! It was a great talk and to sum it up, the new hardware is impressive, very well-thought, future proof in many ways and powerful dsp platform.
Klaus Piehl is an extremly skilled DSP designer imo, he has worked out most major parts of the DSP code of the scope platform, cw synths like the prodyssey - my favorite (scope) synth - and also works on the solaris project.
Thanks again for taking the time to answer all my questions.
me, Klaus Piehl
Jürgen, responsible for the hardware layout, also showed me that heat is no problem with the XITE, as the box stays cool, even without any fan with all the countless sharcs inside. impressive!
So it can be said the Scope hardware is "cool" in both ways: physically and regarding the content/software
I was also told that its not unlikely that different version of the hardware will appear.
They really have an open-ear for what the users scream on that forum.
Its impressive, roughly 1 year has passed and they have build such a powerful device.
Other companies, have hardware design TEAMs, Soniccore simply has ONE man called Jürgen Kindermann. That also impressed me!
It can be said, that these guys complement each other very well in the different fields that are important to built such a platform.
Scope is in very good hands now!
Finally we made some group pictures: ( say cheeeeeze
)
Ralf Bach, me, Klaus Piehl, Holger Drenkelfort, Jürgen Kindermann and Martin (MCCY, in the back)
Apart from the soniccore guys, we also met John Bowen face-to-face. This was also an full enjoyment.
John spend much time talking with us about the Solaris hardware and the XITE box and so on.
Later he showed us many different sounds the solaris is capable to reproduce, from analog sounding pads and lead sounds up to crazy stuff like frequency modulation to the highest regions without any aliasing and so on. They really put much effort into the dsp algos behind the surface of this synth.
It really sounded very nice. Surely this will be an extremly powerful synthesizer.
A very cool feature that impressed me very much was the drive section, which models the analog VCA / the amplifier part of a synthesizer.
One can easily see that John and Soniccore put much effort into this project.
Martin, Boris(me), Christoph and John Bowen
Later we moved on to demo the rest in 5.1 very quickly.
I spent a bit of time checking out the new DSI Prophet `08, yeah I liked it !
The moog booth, where I was pretty underwhelmed by demoing the Moog Little Phatty.
I spent about half an hour on TC booth demoing the Powercore X8, especially the reverbs via headphones.
and finally I met Wolfram Franke on the Waldorf booth, where I had a little talk about the Blofeld, the upcoming Stromberg and the outdated AFB-16. I have to say this little box (Blofeld) is quite powerful for its price and I liked many of the presets and the handling.
Please keep in mind: this is a very compressed version of some of my impressions, but I simply don`t have the time to write down 10 sites.
maybe the others can jump in and post their impressions.
best regards,
Boris
yeah, technical knowledge in all genres ... Yes, my Minolta Z6 has an extreme noizelevel when takin Pictures with 320 ISO... 