DAW Users: Are we left out of the modern display party?

[Sundown]

Hey all,

 

I’ve been daydreaming and shopping for new DAW hardware. A PC Audio Labs Rokbox with a Core i9 13900K CPU and 128 GB of RAM would be my choice if purchased today. But I was looking at new displays, and it sure seems like legacy plugins are hosed when it comes to high resolutions (e.g. 4K, 8K, etc).

 

To leverage all of these pixels it seems like you need to engage HiDPI, but if a plugin is old and doesn’t support it, it will be far too small. And among my plugin collection, I certainly use some elder statesmen.

 

I love these curved displays, but if HiDPI is the enabler, it’s not going to work with my collection of software. My core platform (Cubase 12) can support HiDPI, but I have plenty of early 2000 plugins that I’m sure would be left behind (and I’m not ready to let go of them).

 

Is my interpretation correct, or are there ways to leverage these behemoth displays with legacy software?

 

Todd 

 

 

[Anderton]

Windows can do scaling, I assume the Mac does too, but that's not always a satisfactory solution. Unless a company revised its plug-ins to be scalable, I'm not sure there's much you can do...although the computer whizzes who frequent this forum might have a better idea.

[KuruPrionz]

In my experience, many of the newer plugins sound better and do more things than older plugins. 

I've been using plugins since about 2004 and I wouldn't go back to some of the oldies for anything. 

 

And yes, Macs do some scaling as well but only with scalable plugins which is not all of them. 

[Stokely]

I'm really happy with 2k on a 32" monitor.   I'm sure it can't be as sharp as 4 or 8k, but that size/rez monitor is also very inexpensive (or was a year or two ago).  It also means I don't need to find my glasses to use the system  

I use Kontakt among other older plugins--I am intending to upgrade to Komplete 14 ultimate which should include K7 this summer, if they have their typical sale--so higher rez would be tough.  Something like FM8 is hard to use as it is--though I do consider FM8 pretty much abandonware at this point and would consider a newer FM synth if I did a lot of stuff with FM.   Look and feel is important, and I really like resizable, flat "vector" simple ones.  The newer Logic Pro stock plugins are perfect in my book, I hope they go back and apply that treatment to Sculpture, Ultrabeat and the remaining skeuomorphic ones.

[analogika]

13 hours ago, Anderton said:

Windows can do scaling, I assume the Mac does too, but that's not always a satisfactory solution. Unless a company revised its plug-ins to be scalable, I'm not sure there's much you can do...although the computer whizzes who frequent this forum might have a better idea.

on the Mac, scaling is a non-issue, since HiDPI retina displays have been the default on at least some of the product lines since 2012. Virtually all software released in the last ten years has supported hi-res as standard, and the system has auto-scaled everything else to whatever effective resolution you choose from the very beginning. 

[Anderton]

The issue Sundown was talking about was older plug-ins, and I don't see a way around that. Sure, you can scale Windows to make the little tiny plug-ins bigger, but then 

EVERYTHING ELSE BECOMES BIGGER, TOO.

 

With either Mac or Windows, it's probably best to follow Kuru's advice and update the old plug-ins with newer versions if at all possible.

[analogika]

10 hours ago, Anderton said:

The issue Sundown was talking about was older plug-ins, and I don't see a way around that. Sure, you can scale Windows to make the little tiny plug-ins bigger, but then 

EVERYTHING ELSE BECOMES BIGGER, TOO.

 

With either Mac or Windows, it's probably best to follow Kuru's advice and update the old plug-ins with newer versions if at all possible.

 

As I wrote, this has literally never been an issue on Macs, because on Mac OS X, the system itself is responsible for UI scaling and has understood HiDPI since Day One of the retina MacBooks Pro. The way Apple implemented it is to have developers include "2x"-resolution UI resources within their software bundles, which the system would automatically use at "2x" retina resolutions.
If a bit of software does not include 2x interface elements, Mac OS X appropriately doubles the size of every bit of UI. Older software looks comparatively jagged, but all interface elements have exactly the same physical dimensions as those that supply 2x (retina) resources. 

 

The problem you describe is completely alien to Mac users. 

 

(Intermediate resolutions on Mac are generated by rendering everything at 2x the "virtual" resolution, and then interpolating that to the actual physical pixels — e.g. this 14" MBP has a display resolution of 3024 x 1964, so the system defaults to 1512 x 982 at 2x resolution. I'm old, so I keep it at 1352 x 878, which means that the entire display image is composited and rendered at 2704 x 1756, and then interpolated onto the 3024 x 1964 pixels of the display.)

[Anderton]

2 hours ago, analogika said:

The problem you describe is completely alien to Mac users. 

 

My response pointed out that Sundown's scaling issue was a Windows problem, because that's what he uses ("Sure, you can scale Windows to make the little tiny plug-ins bigger, but then EVERYTHING ELSE BECOMES BIGGER, TOO.")

 

On 3/16/2023 at 10:03 PM, KuruPrionz said:

And yes, Macs do some scaling as well but only with scalable plugins which is not all of them. 

 

Apparently KuruPrionz has had issues, but based on what you say, I'm not sure why.

 

I haven't experienced problems except with Digital Performer, but those problems may have been due for reasons other than what you're talking about. DP only became scalable with DP 10 - this is from their press release: "Scalable UI – Today's high-resolution computer displays have very small pixels, making things tiny and hard to see. In DP10, you can now simply press command-plus and command-minus (control-plus and control-minus on Windows) to scale DP's entire UI larger or smaller to achieve the perfect degree of clarity for your eye." Whatever the reason for the issue, before this update I found DP unusable with high-res displays on Mac or Windows unless I scaled the entire display, which of course introduces its own issues.

[KuruPrionz]

1 minute ago, Anderton said:

 

My response pointed out that the scaling issue was a Windows problem, because that's what Sundown uses ("Sure, you can scale Windows to make the little tiny plug-ins bigger, but then EVERYTHING ELSE BECOMES BIGGER, TOO.")

 

 

Apparently KuruPrionz has had issues, but based on what you say, I'm not sure why.

 

I haven't experienced problems except with Digital Performer, but those problems may have been due for reasons other than what you're talking about. It only became scalable with DP 10 - this is from their press release: "Scalable UI – Today's high-resolution computer displays have very small pixels, making things tiny and hard to see. In DP10, you can now simply press command-plus and command-minus (control-plus and control-minus on Windows) to scale DP's entire UI larger or smaller to achieve the perfect degree of clarity for your eye." Whatever the reason for the issue, before this update I found DP unusable with high-res displays on Mac or Windows.

Unscalable older plugins don't adapt well to enlarging. Many of them could not be "grabbed by the corner and pulled bigger", like modern plugins can.

As we all know, in general, older computers had slower processors, less RAM and smaller hard drives. I didn't own a larger screen for quite some time, eventually I got a 21" iMac when the PowerBook got too old, slow and persnickety. 

 

Just a guess but coders probably spent some time making sure their plugins didn't lock up the then-current resources back then. Things are very different now. 

Which could also be why current plugins sound better. My Mac Power Book back then had 765 MB of RAM and I don't remember the hard drive size but it wasn't very big. G3 or G4 chip? I don't remember and I don't care now. Digital Performer was a struggle and so was Photoshop, which was a RAM hog if you wanted good quality images. 

 

I don't miss those days and I'm not a "stay put where you are" kind of computer user. 

I would prefer "no learning curve" but that is not the story of computer tech at all. Root hog or die!

 

And, many of the modern plugins have improved the simplicity of the GUI so it's actually easier now. Just for one, Eventide's newer plugins have more practical interfaces - Split EQ comes to mind. The business part of it is mostly a graph with frequencies on the horizontal plane and amplitude on the vertical. 2 lines with dots, one for transients and one for tones. VERY easy to drag dots around (or add or subtract dots) on either line (they are different colors). Very mouse friendly, super easy to learn and I don't recall any EQ plugin that I used back in 2004 that had the ability to adjust the transient and the tone separately. Progress!!!!

 

[Sundown]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I’m a Windows user but it’s interesting to hear the Mac side as well.

 

When it comes time to buy, I’ll do an assessment of what I have for compatibility. I would hate to buy new displays that aren’t 4K (though I’m not sure my little work laptop could power one of those huge 40” curved widescreens, and I use my studio as my home office as well). Maybe I would get a pair of 27” or a pair of 30” screens, instead of one curved display.

 

The biggest risk I see right now is UAD, though I know they are working on it for PC. I’m quite sure they are going to port their full library over to their native subscription platform, and maybe then we will see HiDPI. There isn’t a track I write that doesn’t have at least 5 to 10 UAD plugins on it (usually an 1176 or two, a reverb or two, and almost always their SSL G-Bus compressor). I also use their Precision Mastering plugins, though I’m starting to use Newfangled Audio’s Elevate bundle.

 

Waves has already updated for HiDPI and I believe Fabfilter has as well. Fabfilter is my favorite “new guy on the block” and I think their Pro Q3 is the EQ to beat for surgical work.

 

I can convince myself to let go of NI FM8 and Pro53 (though I still like Pro53 better than any other Prophet emulation, despite it’s age). There are a lot of FM synths that have come out since FM8, and HALion 7 has a DX7/TX81Z import feature now. I have always liked the original release better anyhow (FM7).

 

But there are still quite a few instruments and plugins that might not be there yet … I don’t know if Steven Slate’s stuff is updated and I don’t think Synthogy’s Ivory II is updated (and that’s my go-to piano). There are some great free plugins that I’m quite sure aren’t there yet. An example would be TAL-CHORUS-LX. You won’t find a better sounding Roland-like Chorus, and it’s free (though the controls are simple enough that I could still probably operate them at half size).

 

We’ll see where the market goes in the next year or two, but it’s something I will be watching closely.

 

Todd

 

 

 

 

[RABid]

I found out really fast that my coworkers did not care for 4K monitors. I would frequently find them on the lowest resolution because they were having trouble reading menu selections in Office and our clinical software. It took a while for programs to make use of windows settings where you can change default size. I finally trained my staff to adjust those settings before sending computers out to users. Unfortunately many music software companies never made use of these settings.