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Engels

Engels

Active member
Joined
Jun 10, 2013
Messages
38
Location
Italy
Hi everybody,

Once again Waves sent me spam on my email, but this time they were publishing an hardware unit that made me curious a little bit...
This is the 2 unit rack device: http://www.waves.com/hardware/soundgrid-extreme-server
My questions are:
  • is this used for processing audio and vst instead of the computer cpu?
  • you simply link the rack unit with usb port or else?

Well, noobish questions, I know, but this is sort of really interesting thing that I didn't know  :D, so, are there any similar and/or vintage device like this one?
waves used to be expensive as hell imo (analog ssl clone: 250€ +- . Waves Digital ssl bundle: 650$ or more  :-X  )

thanks and byebye
 
Looks like it's running Waves' Soundgrid... 

http://www.waves.com/live-sound/soundgrid

SoundGrid is a proprietary Ethernet Layer 2 protocol and EtherType. Audio is transported and routed between networked I/O devices and is processed on Plugin Servers connected to the same network. The I/O device converts SoundGrid packets to standard and proprietary audio protocol schemes.
Click to expand...

Thats really REALLY impressive stuff.
 
I understand now  :)
Yes, it's really impressive! I was interested since it seems to be pretty usefull for a sort of massive live show like what I've in my mind;
I wonder if the soundgrid system will work with other non-Waves plug-ins, but I bet that if you can afford such a thing, you would not mind about few hundred bucks.
 
"with latency as low as 0.8 milliseconds"

where did you read 0.83 seconds? that's a lot of time!
 
Hmm... I don't know how popular this product will really be.

It seems quite expensive when compared to the UAD-2. And I would think that the fact that many are running cracked versions of Waves plugins would make people think twice about it. The UAD stuff you have to buy if you want the plugin, but people can just run Waves on the CPU.

Plus, I've seen so many people be annoyed with Waves as a company so it really makes me wonder. Maybe it's a great product though.
 
mattiasNYC said:
Hmm... I don't know how popular this product will really be.

It seems quite expensive when compared to the UAD-2. And I would think that the fact that many are running cracked versions of Waves plugins would make people think twice about it. The UAD stuff you have to buy if you want the plugin, but people can just run Waves on the CPU.

Plus, I've seen so many people be annoyed with Waves as a company so it really makes me wonder. Maybe it's a great product though.
Click to expand...


Sound grid is vastly superior to uad in implementation though... Which is why you will find it costs more.... And why you will find it in places that uad cards can't go - like connected to digital live consoles like the sd9 so engineers can use waves plugins in a live venue for live music.
 
Sammas said:
mattiasNYC said:
Hmm... I don't know how popular this product will really be.

It seems quite expensive when compared to the UAD-2. And I would think that the fact that many are running cracked versions of Waves plugins would make people think twice about it. The UAD stuff you have to buy if you want the plugin, but people can just run Waves on the CPU.

Plus, I've seen so many people be annoyed with Waves as a company so it really makes me wonder. Maybe it's a great product though.
Click to expand...


Sound grid is vastly superior to uad in implementation though... Which is why you will find it costs more.... And why you will find it in places that uad cards can't go - like connected to digital live consoles like the sd9 so engineers can use waves plugins in a live venue for live music.
Click to expand...

Well, I can see how it's useful live if it somehow offers better latency for example, or plugins more suited for live work. Outside of that though, how is the "implementation" "vastly superior"? Just curious....
 
mattiasNYC said:
Well, I can see how it's useful live if it somehow offers better latency for example, or plugins more suited for live work. Outside of that though, how is the "implementation" "vastly superior"? Just curious....
Click to expand...

It might be a bit difficult to understand but there is a whole "large scale systems" world outside the project/home studio DAW. Even the related jargon is somewhat different, the brands unfamiliar to the casual shopper of musicians friend. You and your friends might be perfectly happy with 8-16 track I/O and cracked waves plugins for the rest of your lives.

But U2 and Nickelback would now like to go on tour. And they need 200 discrete feeds for the main mix to the audience alone. When I say "discrete", I don't mean a track in a DAW, but something with an analog end point, whether input or output. What about those 30 I/O feeds to Edge's in-ear monitors and multiple guitar rigs? And now all of those feeds need swiss-army-knife plugins and we can't have latency!

"Woefully inadequate" isn't quite enough to describe the problems with UAD-2 or Apollo in this scenario.  :eek:

In other words, the large format scalable digital live sound systems have different needs than your home DAW. For more details, soundgrid specifications should be online somewhere.

[edit]

during the Olympics we had related discussion and links to some very interesting articles on this topic. The size of the sound system of the opening ceremony was stupendously large. Heck, their crew communications system alone had to cater for a small city! Those people might have had some interest in this waves thing, for example. I'll post the link if I find it.
 
mattiasNYC said:
Sammas said:
mattiasNYC said:
Hmm... I don't know how popular this product will really be.

It seems quite expensive when compared to the UAD-2. And I would think that the fact that many are running cracked versions of Waves plugins would make people think twice about it. The UAD stuff you have to buy if you want the plugin, but people can just run Waves on the CPU.

Plus, I've seen so many people be annoyed with Waves as a company so it really makes me wonder. Maybe it's a great product though.
Click to expand...


Sound grid is vastly superior to uad in implementation though... Which is why you will find it costs more.... And why you will find it in places that uad cards can't go - like connected to digital live consoles like the sd9 so engineers can use waves plugins in a live venue for live music.
Click to expand...

Well, I can see how it's useful live if it somehow offers better latency for example, or plugins more suited for live work. Outside of that though, how is the "implementation" "vastly superior"? Just curious....
Click to expand...

Soundgrid allows entire multi room facilities and venues to be constructed around one centralised soundgrid network using cat5 cable. That's what soundgrid is... A network audio protocol.



 
Kingston said:
mattiasNYC said:
Well, I can see how it's useful live if it somehow offers better latency for example, or plugins more suited for live work. Outside of that though, how is the "implementation" "vastly superior"? Just curious....
Click to expand...

It might be a bit difficult to understand but there is a whole "large scale systems" world outside the project/home studio DAW. Even the related jargon is somewhat different, the brands unfamiliar to the casual shopper of musicians friend. You and your friends might be perfectly happy with 8-16 track I/O and cracked waves plugins for the rest of your lives.

But U2 and Nickelback would now like to go on tour. And they need 200 discrete feeds for the main mix to the audience alone. When I say "discrete", I don't mean a track in a DAW, but something with an analog end point, whether input or output. What about those 30 I/O feeds to Edge's in-ear monitors and multiple guitar rigs? And now all of those feeds need swiss-army-knife plugins and we can't have latency!

"Woefully inadequate" isn't quite enough to describe the problems with UAD-2 or Apollo in this scenario.  :eek:

In other words, the large format scalable digital live sound systems have different needs than your home DAW. For more details, soundgrid specifications should be online somewhere.

[edit]

during the Olympics we had related discussion and links to some very interesting articles on this topic. The size of the sound system of the opening ceremony was stupendously large. Heck, their crew communications system alone had to cater for a small city! Those people might have had some interest in this waves thing, for example. I'll post the link if I find it.
Click to expand...

See the bolded part.

I work in studios 90% of the time, and sometimes take the work home with me. All 100% legit workstations, nothing cracked. I was simply contemplating the merits of this product for studios and individuals and the sad truth is that many studios and individuals indeed use cracks that run on the CPU, which gives UAD an advantage because there is no way to use their plugs without their hardware.
 
Sammas said:
mattiasNYC said:
Sammas said:
mattiasNYC said:
Hmm... I don't know how popular this product will really be.

It seems quite expensive when compared to the UAD-2. And I would think that the fact that many are running cracked versions of Waves plugins would make people think twice about it. The UAD stuff you have to buy if you want the plugin, but people can just run Waves on the CPU.

Plus, I've seen so many people be annoyed with Waves as a company so it really makes me wonder. Maybe it's a great product though.
Click to expand...


Sound grid is vastly superior to uad in implementation though... Which is why you will find it costs more.... And why you will find it in places that uad cards can't go - like connected to digital live consoles like the sd9 so engineers can use waves plugins in a live venue for live music.
Click to expand...

Well, I can see how it's useful live if it somehow offers better latency for example, or plugins more suited for live work. Outside of that though, how is the "implementation" "vastly superior"? Just curious....
Click to expand...

Soundgrid allows entire multi room facilities and venues to be constructed around one centralised soundgrid network using cat5 cable. That's what soundgrid is... A network audio protocol.
Click to expand...

Ah, this makes total sense to me. So what you're saying is that a facility could buy and expand their soundgrid centrally and all existing and new workstations could access that processing power via cat5? That seems to be of some convenience for sure.

It'll be interesting to see how the product will do in this market.
 
This is no doubt a very interesting product.  I think the thing that scares me is "as low as" .8ms.  That means that it can be more sometimes?  I don't care much about ideal testing results in their lab.  Add up CPU time on either side, serialization, and transport, that leaves VERY little time inside that .8ms for dealing with even the tiniest amount of jitter.

At least with local DSP offloading like UAD, that latency number never changes.  I'm sure they've thought of all this but it's certainly a scary challenge, especially in a large shared environment.  Putting on my network engineer hat for a second, I would think that a decent implementation will have a pretty good infrastructure investment above and beyond the cost of the system in order to make it function properly.
 

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