Waves Audio AAX DSP ??

[1m1]

During the conversation I had with the Waves rep at NAMM, he said a few times that the round trip latency from Pro Tools to DigiGrid and back going thru plugins was 1 millisecond. I don't know how they achieve this, but this is what the claim is.

So, while recording into Pro Tools, the idea is that your record signal path can go thru the plugins if you use DigiGrid, whereas if you were using only AAX Native plugins you couldn't. If you're only mixing or don't need to track thru plugins, then AAX Native might be sufficient.

[groundcontrol]

Was the sampling rate given for that latency figure?

[1m1]

No, sorry, I didn't ask about the sampling rate.

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Intel x86 processors are not "optimized for or and doing nothing but floating point math".

The TDM/DSP plugin confusion compatibility is in other threads on DUC, (which many of the same folks here are posting/to reading), and on other forums, and is in part triggered by continued reference to these boxes having DSP processing. Something that is technically just not correct. The meaning of what is a DSP processor and what is a general purpose processor (even one with DSP oriented instructions) is pretty clear and is not defined by its use. I come at this space from a pretty technical background in the x86 processor and operating systems, and anybody arguing an x86 processor is a "DSP" is just ridiculous. The intelligent discussion would be on what are the advantage and disadvantages of using commodity/general purpose CPU vs. DSP based plugin processing.

Darryl

While we're on the subject of accuracy, am I or am I not a Waves Marketing Shill? Yes or No. I'll make it easy for you to answer. 1 for yes, 0 for no?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

While we're on the subject of accuracy, am I or am I not a Waves Marketing Shill? Yes or No. I'll make it easy for you to answer. 1 for yes, 0 for no?

I'll make it easy for you. DSP in the box or not, yes or no?

And your answer will likely let folks here determine for themselves if you are a marketing shill for Waves or not.

Darryl

[dave911]

Originally Posted by 1m1

During the conversation I had with the Waves rep at NAMM, he said a few times that the round trip latency from Pro Tools to DigiGrid and back going thru plugins was 1 millisecond. I don't know how they achieve this, but this is what the claim is.

So, while recording into Pro Tools, the idea is that your record signal path can go thru the plugins if you use DigiGrid, whereas if you were using only AAX Native plugins you couldn't. If you're only mixing or don't need to track thru plugins, then AAX Native might be sufficient.

Waves has round-trip latency charts posted for soundgrid systems with specific pugin counts.
All but the lowest end all are around 1ms at 48Khz.

Looks like a combination of real-time Linux, Intel processors and I believe the Digigrid system will have FPGA's to handle the network routing.

Intel processors have dedicated pipelines for DSP type instructions and extensive DSP instruction sets.

And good things are comiing from Intel:

"The other major addition to the execution engine is support for Intel's AVX2 instructions, including FMA (Fused Multiply-Add). Ports 0 & 1 now include newly designed 256-bit FMA units. As each FMA operation is effectively two floating point operations, these two units double the peak floating point throughput of Haswell compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge. A side effect of the FMA units is that you now get two ports worth of FP multiply units, which can be a big boon to legacy FP code"

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I'll make it easy for you. DSP in the box or not, yes or no?

And your answer will likely let folks here determine for themselves if you are a marketing shill for Waves or not.

Darryl

Spare us the disingenuous evasion.

I've already answered that question. I had the decency to admit I was wrong. The chip in the SoundGride Server is not a dedicated DSP chip although as far as the end user is concerned it might as well be for all practical purposes.

So.... given my reply to your post earlier in this thread, perhaps you'd allow me the decency of an answer. Am I or am I not a Waves Marketing Shill? Yes or No?

[Mark Ziebarth]

are you going to duel? It's not worth the hassle

Best

Mark

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by dave911

Waves has round-trip latency charts posted for soundgrid systems with specific pugin counts.
All but the lowest end all are around 1ms at 48Khz.

Looks like a combination of real-time Linux, Intel processors and I believe the Digigrid system will have FPGA's to handle the network routing.

Intel processors have dedicated pipelines for DSP type instructions and extensive DSP instruction sets.

And good things are comiing from Intel:

"The other major addition to the execution engine is support for Intel's AVX2 instructions, including FMA (Fused Multiply-Add). Ports 0 & 1 now include newly designed 256-bit FMA units. As each FMA operation is effectively two floating point operations, these two units double the peak floating point throughput of Haswell compared to Sandy/Ivy Bridge. A side effect of the FMA units is that you now get two ports worth of FP multiply units, which can be a big boon to legacy FP code"

Dave, this is all well and good but the elephant in the room is that Evolution mixer. It's a total deal breaker.

To track through a SoundGrid plug-in and route to a Pro Tools track you have to use the Emotion mixer to pick up an input from your SoundGrid input interface and THEN patch it through to Pro Tools via the Core Audio /ASIO driver and THEN set the Pro Tools track input to the corresponding output from the Emotion mixer.

Then if you want to instantiate a SoundGrid plug-in on a Pro Tools track you have to route that track back to Emotion, instantiate the plug-in in Emotion and then send back to Pro Tools? You can't instantiate SoundGrid plug-ins directly within Pro Tools. The only thing that shows up in Pro Tools is the "dummy" plug in used to automate the SoundGrid plug-in running in Emotion.

Alternatively Waves suggest you could route ALL your DAW outputs to Emotion and do all your mixing there. But what happens if you want to use a plug-in chain that goes > Waves Plug-in on SoundGrid > McDSP EQ in PT > then Waves SoundGrid plug-in then bleed off an aux send to Revibe in Pro Tools.

That's my understanding anyway and I really I've got this wrong because it's the workflow from hell. (And I'm the Waves Marketing Shill )

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

it's the workflow from hell.

You actually got that part right