Cardiff, UK, October 23, 2000 -- Soundscape Digital Technology is delighted to announce the most eagerly anticipated hardware addition to the Soundscape product range since the award winning 32 track R.Ed DAW.

mixpander PCI card (click for larger view)

The Soundscape mixpander PCI card provides a massive amount of additional DSP processing power for Soundscape R.Ed and SSHDR1-Plus Digital Audio Workstations. It connects to the 512 channel Expansion Bus Port on the rear panel of Soundscape DAWs and integrates with the Soundscape Mixer transparently, taking advantage of all the real-time DSP effects plug-ins already purchased and authorised for the DAW. The V3.0 Dynamic Mix Automation feature in the SSEditor software extends automatically to mixpander and external control of mixing and effects is provided through Soundscape's Console Manager.

mixpander is designed to add serious amounts of additional DSP processing to cope with any size of mixing task and has the power and bussing structure that can be compared to that of top flight digital consoles, plus a rack of outboard effects processor units. mixpander has full 24 bit, 96kHz operation for complete compatibility with R.Ed, and this makes R.Ed the only system available that is able to run DSP based real-time plug-ins like the TC Reverb and TC Dynamizer plus other effects from Apogee, Aphex, Arboretum Systems, Wave Mechanics and Sonic Timeworks all at 96kHz.

The board includes state of the art digital devices and advanced architecture to provide unequalled flexibility and processing efficiency. mixpander/9 contains 9 of the latest Motorola 563xx DSPs on both sides of a full length PCI card. The total processing capability is up to 2.6 GIPS (Giga Instructions per Second). This is more than 11 times the processing capability that's already included inside the R.Ed unit and 15 times the processing power of an SSHDR1-Plus. Suffice to say, it's enough processing power to cope with even the largest mixing and effects processing jobs.

mixpander/5 contains 5 Motorola 563xx DSPs for up to 1.4 GIPS of processing power and is 5 times more powerful than R.Ed or 8 times more powerful than SSHDR1-Plus.

To give an idea of what a mixpander/9 is capable of, one card can run 10 x heavyweight TC Reverbs, plus a 32 channel, 32 bus, 5.1 surround mixer, with 4 master channels for simultaneous 5.1, LCRS, Dolby surround and stereo outputs. You can add 4 bands of fully parametric EQ, Dynamics processing and 8 sends on every channel, a Dolby Surround Encoder, 2 x stereo Aphex Aural Exciters and an Aphex Big Bottom Pro, 24 stereo delay based effects (chorus, flangers, delays etc.) and a top notch multi-band processor like the TC Dynamizer on a stereo sub-mix.

Put another way, one mixpander/9 can run 10 TC Reverbs, 60 dynamics processors (gate/expander/compressor/limiter), 300 bands of fully parametric EQ, 6 TC Dynamizers and 30 Delays simultaneously at 24 bit, 44.1kHz. Whichever way you want to use it, there's an awesome amount of DSP power available.

There are a total of 640 audio connections between the DSPs plus 32 channels of additional audio streaming from the PCI bus of the PC. Add the 16 busses per DSP chip and the fact that no busses are required for routing between in-line effects or other DSP elements in each channel strip (eg. EQs, sends, faders, meters etc.), and you end up with a staggering number of possible connections. There's fully automatic routing between DSPs as standard, but there's a manual override for users who want to delve into the complex routing and effects flexibility.

Seven of the DSPs have their own external 384kB of super fast effects memory and two are equipped with even larger amounts (1.5MB) of super fast SRAM for running multiple 'memory hungry' effects (eg. Reverbs, Chorus/Flangers, Delays etc.). This advanced architechure has been designed to allow the DSPs to achieve maximum processing efficiency. Compare this performance to that from any other system and nothing even comes close. Sharing of memory resources, common in the less sophisticated architectures of other systems, places a restriction on each DSP, resulting in much lower overall performance.

mixpander has up to 32 channels of Super Low Latency (SLL) MME (wave), ASIO-2 and GSIF (native multi-channel Gigasampler/Gigastudio) drivers, which are full duplex, multi-client and respond down to 1.5mS for the lowest latency available for any PCI card. This means that mixpander can accommodate any host based software synthesizers (eg. Seer Systems SurReal/Reality, Native Instruments Generator, Bitheadz Unity1, Propellerheads Rebirth etc.), software samplers like Nemesys Gigasampler/Gigastudio, plus output from any audio sequencer package at the same time. The SLL technology allows the synths and samplers to respond as fast as hardware units, even when recording or playing 32 tracks or more from the Soundscape DAW. These PC audio channels are routed directly into the real-time mixer running on the mixpander DSPs and are combined with tracks from R.Ed or SSHDR1-Plus, so providing the ultimate integration of DSP based mixing and audio recording, with native PC based audio processing, software synthesis, sampling and MIDI sequencing.

Why do you need DSPs?
If you believe the advertising of many 'host based' products that claim that all you need is a fast PC then you would think that there's no need for dedicated DSP (Digital Signal Processor) devices. However for audio processing, one DSP running at 100MHz provides as much processing power as a 500MHz CPU and can provide true real-time processing, without the poor latency (delay) issues that are the downfall of host based systems. When you compare actually what one mixpander/9 board offers, there's no general purpose computer that can provide anywhere near the same performance, at any price. The top audio Professionals have long realised that there's no substitute for having the right tools for the job and mixpander is designed purely for processing real-time digital audio effects. By comparison, a general purpose PC is designed for many tasks and audio processing probably didn't even figure into this.

mixpander/9 - List Price US$2500 (GBP2100 inc. VAT); mixpander/5 - List Price US$1800 (GBP1500 inc. VAT); International pricing may vary according to exchange rates, local sales tax and import duties etc. mixpander is expected to ship in initial quantities in November 2000, with full mass production expected in January 2001 and will be available worldwide from Soundscape international distributors and dealers. For more information contact: Soundscape Digital Technology; sales@soundscape-digital.com; us-sales@soundscape-digital.com; www.soundscape-digital.com; Tel: +44 (0)1222 540333; Fax: +44 (0)1222 540332.


Source: Soundscape Digital Technology
Web: www.soundscape-digital.com