Creating reverb bus eating CPU?

[Leonard Sunshine]

Hi there,

I have the following problem: I make a stereo aux and set up a reverb (ie. Rverb). When I start to assign send outs for tracks (snare, vocal, guitars) to this aux, my CPU consumption start to increase. What the f...k is this? Does anyone has the same problem? How to avoid this kind of "send effects sympdrome"?

Leo

[PsyCoNo]

Try inserting dither before the reverb, that should do it.

[Detuned6]

Try inserting dither before the reverb, that should do it.

Should the dither be set to 16 or 24 bit????

[Chris Cavell]

24, and don't use any noise shaping. Renn Verb rarely suffers the denormal issue though...

[sirreal06]

I was curious about this dilemma myself. So is it safe to assume that when a dither is inserted at the beginning of an fx chain it will lead to more efficient CPU usage and decreased error messages about the playback engine and hardware buffer, etc...

Just curious, I had been having similar problems when my track increased.

Also, I was thinking of adding a 512 Meg RAM stick to my CPU. I currently have 512 Megs. For Protoools functionality, would this be beneficial at all?

B. Morris

[Chris Cavell]

I was curious about this dilemma myself. So is it safe to assume that when a dither is inserted at the beginning of an fx chain it will lead to more efficient CPU usage and decreased error messages about the playback engine and hardware buffer, etc...

Only if one or more of the FX that follow the dither bring on a CPU's denormal mode.

Also, I was thinking of adding a 512 Meg RAM stick to my CPU. I currently have 512 Megs. For Protoools functionality, would this be beneficial at all?

Possibly. It's a bit system and demand dependent.

[spkguitar]

Perhaps an explanation of the denormalization problem would help here.

The problem is caused by certain plugins performing very precise mathematical calculations with very small numbers close to zero (silence). This causes the CPU to go into high precision mode, using up all available processing power. This is known as denormalization. The only fix is for the plugin developers to write additional code which prevents the CPU from going into high precision mode (actually, there is a partial work-around which I mention later).

(The workaround mentioned later in the article is the dither issue we're discussing here.)

[sirreal06]

Thanks for that info, so I guess the answer to my question would be "yes inserting a dither can help to curb these problems when used properly..." Is that pretty accurate? I am not very saavy in the digital recording realm so comprehending the application of techniques specific to Cubase transferred to Protools may take some time for me. Am I in the right arena with my assumption?

Sorry if I sound...uuh...not so smart but I am a newbie to the Protools (and PC recording in general) platform.

B. Morris

[Matt Whritenour]

Should the dither be set to 16 or 24 bit????

it won't give you the choice for 24 bit, so you should choose 20 bit

[Chris Cavell]

Matt, that depends on what dither you use for this purpose.