HEAT in Native P Tools. Is this possible?

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by zedhed

Looking into the future, judging by how powerful computers have become lately, I guess the question needs to be asked; Will there be any real need for DSP cards going forward. Will they just be a specific way of selling Hardware?

As long as the CPU remains the way they are built, yep. It's not onlly the speed that matters but how deterministic (to steal that from Dave Tremblay) the dsp chips used can actually be. They are build to do one thing, and one thing only. Where the CPU are general purpose build to do many things at the same time. I'm sure you can agree that one thing that does only one thing at the time (in this case process audio) gives better result and quality and that is better than something that has to deal with 500 thing at once. Imagine if your heart surgeon was to actually answer his emails, call his wife, look at his pension funds, run on the thread mill and other things at the same time he was already in the process of giving you a triple by pass. And then there's the question of near zero latency the cards enables when tracking, the amount of power they add to the system (even more so now with how the AAX plugins can be shared between DSP and Native at the same time at the leisure of the plugin manufacturer) etc etc etc.

[zedhed]

But there's no reason those chips couldn't be integrated into a 'specialized' motherboard...no?

[Bill Denton]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

As long as the CPU remains the way they are built, yep. It's not onlly the speed that matters but how deterministic (to steal that from Dave Tremblay) the dsp chips used can actually be. They are build to do one thing, and one thing only. Where the CPU are general purpose build to do many things at the same time. I'm sure you can agree that one thing that does only one thing at the time (in this case process audio) gives better result and quality and that is better than something that has to deal with 500 thing at once. Imagine if your heart surgeon was to actually answer his emails, call his wife, look at his pension funds, run on the thread mill and other things at the same time he was already in the process of giving you a triple by pass. And then there's the question of near zero latency the cards enables when tracking, the amount of power they add to the system (even more so now with how the AAX plugins can be shared between DSP and Native at the same time at the leisure of the plugin manufacturer) etc etc etc.

Minor little thing wrong with your analogy...

Your heart surgeon is of finite size and ability. But if you could add extra arms, another brain, etc, he could do more work, more efficiently.

You can watch YouTube and work on a Word document at the same time, and quite well, today, can't you?

But even if the OS allowed it, can you imagine trying to do it on the old Z80 chips used in some of the first personal computers?

But, unlike your heart surgeon, the abilities of "general purpose" computer chips are greatly expanding with each generation.

Consequently, as Waves may soon show us, today's "general purpose" computer chips may well be able to give DSP performance just as good as, or even better than, the dedicated DSP chips now in use.

So don't count out general purpose chips in favor of dedicated chips just yet. And don't forget the limits both of human abilities and just plain old time.

Could someone produce an audio monitor that would reproduce a range between 2 Hz and 200,000 Hz? Maybe, but since the limit of human hearing is only +/- 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (at best) what would be the point?

And you can't process a sound before it has been made, as there is nothing to process.

And finally, a "Bill" analogy...

A DSP chip = a 4,000 sq. ft. building. A "general purpose" chip = an airplane hanger big enough for a Boeing 747.

Could you set up a very nice "house" inside of a DSP chip? Yes, you could.

Could you set up a very nice "house" inside of 4,000 sq. ft. of a "general purpose" chip? Yes, you could.

True, you would have a lot of wasted space inside the "general purpose" chip, but if the rent is cheap enough and the electricity cost is low enough, who cares?

[Rectifried]

I had the Phoenix and really really hated not having it when went hd 3 to hd n
I sold it ... Then he came out with the rtas!!
I didn't rebuy since its really expensive..I would have upgraded, but buying again .. Somehow harder... As it is I trimed all my plugins back
But never found the Phoenix replacement. Slate Kramer radiator decap... They never get that high thing his has
I like Dave hills work, im a avocet user

So about native heat...
You ever know

[nigelpry]

Bill, is your full name Wilhelmina?

You must be a woman if you can multi-task well enough to write a memo in Word and watch youtube at the same time ;-)

Seriously though, I like both analogies, they both usefully help to add to our understanding of the discusiion on the potential for a native Heat.

I've never used it, but I've seen a lot of people on these forums praise it highly, so I've every reason to believe it's damn good. Of course that makes it desirable too.

At the risk of being told to go away and RTFM, am I right in thinking that Heat is a fancy analog audio path emulator ... i.e. it emulates the distortion caused to audio signals passing through analog mixing desks and tape decks?

If that's pretty much the case, not wanting to hijack the thread, but for non-HD users I can recommend McDSP's analog channel, which comprises two plugins, one to do the analog desk channel strip emulation and the other to do the analog tape machine emulation.

I'd be really interested to hear from people who have experience of Heat and of Analog Channel (or indeed the Waves or UAD plugins that do similar things) .... how do they compare? Is Heat way better? Different? Have I got it completely wrong?

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by nigelpry

I'd be really interested to hear from people who have experience of Heat and of Analog Channel .... how do they compare? Is Heat way better? Different? Have I got it completely wrong?

They're totally different.

McDSP Analog Channel does nice things for a single channel, but HEAT kind of fills the empty spots in the image in a nice way IMO. It is not possible to create the HEAT effect with AC -- that said, I do like what AC does so I'm not at all dissing it. Just that I like HEAT much more, and it is both easier to use and easier for DSP.

[Bill Denton]

Originally Posted by nigelpry

Bill, is your full name Wilhelmina?

You must be a woman if you can multi-task well enough to write a memo in Word and watch youtube at the same time ;-)

Seriously though, I like both analogies, they both usefully help to add to our understanding of the discusiion on the potential for a native Heat.

I've never used it, but I've seen a lot of people on these forums praise it highly, so I've every reason to believe it's damn good. Of course that makes it desirable too.

At the risk of being told to go away and RTFM, am I right in thinking that Heat is a fancy analog audio path emulator ... i.e. it emulates the distortion caused to audio signals passing through analog mixing desks and tape decks?

If that's pretty much the case, not wanting to hijack the thread, but for non-HD users I can recommend McDSP's analog channel, which comprises two plugins, one to do the analog desk channel strip emulation and the other to do the analog tape machine emulation.

I'd be really interested to hear from people who have experience of Heat and of Analog Channel (or indeed the Waves or UAD plugins that do similar things) .... how do they compare? Is Heat way better? Different? Have I got it completely wrong?

Well, as (IIRC) David Byrne of Talking Heads once said, "I could never be a woman "cause I'd spend all of my time playing with my t*ts", I'm in the same boat, although I do find fun things to do with my male parts...

And here's another analogy I frequently use...I can go into Walmart and buy a $2.00 wrist watch that has more CPU processing power than many banks had when I was in high school.

Now consider a mythical company that has a person who's only job is to answer the "customer" phone, and enter a customer's order into the computer. That's all the computer is used for.

The amount of CPU power required to accomplish this task is quite small. So one could well buy a very cheap computer to do the job, maybe one that only has the amount of CPU power required to do that job.

Well, good luck with that! A processor with only that much power would have to be custom-built, and would most likely cost thousands of times as much than the cost of one of today's low-end general purpose processors.

This is somewhat like the dedicated DSP chips vs general-purpose chips argument that exists today.

As designers use more and more general-purpose processors to perform DSP tasks, fewer and fewer dedicated DSP chips will be sold. Once a certain sales threshold is reached, chip makers will decide there is no need to further develop their DSP chip line (or lines).

And as fewer dedicated DSP chips are sold, another threshold will be reached where economies of scale are lost, and the price of dedicated DSP chips will start to increase.

In the mean time, general-purpose chips will have vastly increased in power while decreasing in cost (see Moore's law). And the chip's electrical power consumption keeps going down.

Once the general-purpose chip can do what a dedicated DSP chip can do, the general-purpose chip will be quite a bit cheaper than a dedicated DSP chip. So, even though doing only a DSP task might mean that 99.9% of the general-purpose processor is simply thrown away, it will make more economic sense to use a general-purpose processor.

As I've previously noted, Waves will apparently be using general-purpose chips in their DSP boxes.

So, how will this impact Avid, in general, and HDX in particular. Actually, very little.

For some tasks, better performance will be obtained by continuing to use a dedicated DSP card as it may not make economic sense to include the necessary DSP processing "engine" as an integral part of the motherboard.

So Avid can continue to sell "HDX" cards, except they will use general-purpose processors instead of dedicated DSP chips.

There you have it...the future on a silver platter...

And how does this fit in with Heat-on-native? Well, perhaps nothing, but I had a choice between writing this and doing laundry...

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

I had a choice between writing this and doing laundry...

I cannot imagine how this was the wise thing to do