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Emulator X?


radiospace

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Whattya you guys think about the new PCI-card sampling system from Emu, the Emulator X?

 

It sounds pretty promising offhand, being able to run a sampler in your PC without taxing the CPU. But as a new owner of a TC Electronics Powercore, I'm well aware that to take advantage of PCI-based computing power usually incurs a rather severe latency penalty. I wonder how Emu has gotten around this? (The "zero latency hardware based monitoring" in their marketing lingo probably means you aren't listening to your performance in the mix, but straight off the PCI card; not what I'm talking about...)

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Originally posted by radiospace:

Whattya you guys think about the new PCI-card sampling system from Emu, the Emulator X?

 

It sounds pretty promising offhand, being able to run a sampler in your PC without taxing the CPU.

Unfortunately it isn't so. Some informed people say that IO card do not handle resampling or filters - only serves as DA, FX processor and piracy protection dongle. CPU does almost the whole thing .E-mu gets totally 'creative'.
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Wow, that sounds like a completely useless product! And what misleading marketing to go with it!
i wouldn't go so far as to call it 'completely useless'.

the fx on the card would reduce your cpu usage.

misleading marketing? - i guess that's a maybe.

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Well, obviously strictly speaking it will have "uses", therefore it isn't useless. However if what I want is a softsampler, with the effects run on a PCI card to reduce CPU usage, I'd rather have Kontakt and use TC Electronics world class effects on the plug-ins.

 

Oh, wait, that's exactly what I've got. :D

 

Anyway, I wouldn't want to drop a PCI card into my machine whose only function was to add effects to my Emu softsampler; let's put it that way.

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..so having EOS Filters and ModMatrix on a PCI card with emu proprietary DSP was just a dream..

 

when i first heard "emulator x" i already saw myself selling E4 ultra and buying another comp for this (E4 on a card). was i naive.

 

emu we knew is obviously dead.

the end of an era. :cry:

http://www.babic.com - music for film/theatre, audio-post
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Originally posted by clusterchord:

..so having EOS Filters and ModMatrix on a PCI card with emu proprietary DSP was just a dream..

 

when i first heard "emulator x" i already saw myself selling E4 ultra and buying another comp for this (E4 on a card). was i naive.

 

emu we knew is obviously dead.

the end of an era. :cry:

Trully said. Especially considering their cancelation of hardware instrument line. really sad. What about other two EMU PCI audio systems, is it a same story?
Fat But Fast
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It gives you just a little more than just FX power: its I/O features are pretty good, so if you need a way to get optical or word clock into or out of your PC, or firewire, those are good features. If you think of the card as a software dongle, the price is in line with a good softsampler, and it looks as though the software itself is the Proteus engine, which has some killer features that you don't see much of anywhere else. But I'm with you- I'd rather have that engine in a hardware synth, and have a PCI card with DSP. Unfortunately, Creative's history has been to dissolve companies that it buys, so E-mu likely already exists in name only.

Creative recently bought a company which provides the sound that goes on, oh, 95% or so of the motherboards that have embedded sound, so they're headed for a monopoly on the PC sound market.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Has anyone tried it out?

 

How good are the filters within their VSTi sampler, are they even remotely modelled after E4 z-planes ?

 

Are there any goodies from EOS in the voice arhitecture, like modulation matrix , extensive mapping, cc mapping and such?

 

/Mod matrix on EOS instruments is still one of the most flexible implementations of "modular" features on a digital instrument./

http://www.babic.com - music for film/theatre, audio-post
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E-MU is on a downhill trend. First they dumped Ensoniq, now they are dumping their own keyboard line and the modules are probably soon to follow. This may be a last-ditch effort.....hard to say. We'll give them 5 years, maybe. :rolleyes:
When an eel hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a Moray.
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