Test Labs

2020 Q1 – Cpu’s in the Studio overview

So, here we are, back with a look over the array of CPU’s that arrived around xmas 2019 and the start of this year. Rather late to the party this time I fully admit, but it’s been an interesting journey just to get here.

Around the start of last November Intel announced its next iteration of its X299 refresh as being imminent. The timing stood out as potentially taking the wind out of AMD’s own launch of the much anticipated 3950X, although what was notable at the time was a lack of chips from either firm being immediately available. AMD managed to start rolling out the 3950X’s properly a few weeks later and into our hands over the xmas period, whilst Intel also got a few chips out over January although since then however availablity has remained erratic due to at first Chinese new year and the subsequent rise in the Coronavirus impacting the supply chain of hardware coming out of the Asia region.

Since then AMD has gone on to release further new Threadripper solutions over the last few weeks, which are continuing to create a buzz from the market at large. Intel on the other hand continues to be dogged by supply chain issues with the 10900X only appearing whilst writing this up and the 10940X still sitting on the list of chips to acquire and test in the near future.

So, availability aside, why was there no testing done late 2019?

Well, we tried is the answer, but it wasn’t to be. Along with the stock scarcity, I did manage to test most of the chips I could find, only to watch it all fall over when the initial 10980XE sample arrived. This is the first time that I’ve put a 18 core chip through the Reaper based DAWBench VI test and it became clear in testing that once we passed 32 threads in this build, some internal dependencies caused by the way that Kontakt was being mapped were limiting its ability to balance across more than 16 cores/32 threads successfully.

This issue was escalated back to Vin at DAWBench who then spent much of his xmas break rebuilding the testing suite and making it more suitable for high core count CPU’s going forward. After a closed beta throughout a large part of January this year we’ve finally got a release candidate that can be run over the chips as we start again from the ground up.

This means the hybrid test’s that I ran with last time in order to solve the issue of running out of test overhead are retired in favour of two new builds developed by Vin himself. The SGA 1566 test is pretty close to the version I ran last time, with the SGA test remaining largely the same as the older public build but with the audio quality of the plugin being switched to “high performance” in order to cause more load on the CPU.

As noted the new DAWBench VI build has changed to ensure smooth balancing on extreme core counts and is now based around a larger number of single instances, rather than running a multiple instruments per Kontakt instant design, it now runs a one instrument per instance layout with multi-processing disabled within Kontakt to allow the sequencer to spread the load easier. The new test has some interesting restrictions such as pre-loading close to 30GB’s worth of data when all the instances are live, which make it a bit more unwieldy in some situations. However, having tested it on 64 thread successfully it does seem to allow Reaper to manage the load balance to the best of its ability, making me confident that this should be scalable for a quite a while longer going forward.

This isn’t going to be like a normal run down, in that I’m not going in depth with specific chips this time. This is more of a catch up or state of play post to allow us to see the market as it stands. All prior benchmarks are invalid as comparisons as these are brand-new tests to enable us to be able to validate the new hardware.

So, from the top I should mention what I haven’t covered and why as I’m sure a lot of people are asking the relevant questions in relation to those models already.

First off the big omission is the new Threadripper chips and model dependent I saw two different problems that tripped me up here.

In testing on the 64 thread 3970X I saw it refuse to run cleanly on the DB VI test at a 64 buffer, where it simply crackled constantly with little to no load applied. It did run better on a 128 buffer, but the score still placed it behind a number of far weaker chips, so it didn’t look to handle itself well. The 256 buffer and upwards seemed to slowly creep towards the sort of performance levels I would hope to see, pretty much repeating the sort of issue’s we saw in previous generations with the low latency performance hole.

So, we thought there might be a few usable scenarios to be had, but then we ran the DSP test and hit another snag. The projects in that SGA DSP test would always overload at around 60 %- 65% load and I didn’t see a way around this in the time I spent with it. I’ve tried different memory types and speeds, but no matter what it seemed to cap out there.

I also took a look at the mighty 3990X, although was beaten here as well for a slightly different reason. There have been reports in the wider press about software having trouble addressing all the cores currently due to underlying Windows interactions, and we saw pretty much that there. With Reaper, we could only address 64 threads out of the 128 and it behaved much like the 3970X in the testing above. I had wondered if the Windows Pro Workstation build with its support for improved addressing across more cores might help, but the feedback so far is that it’s currently ineffective and comments from Microsoft and AMD would appear to currently bear this out and it remains one to keep an eye out in the future.

I have managed to take a look at a number of the Intel 10 series enthusiast range chips, although what we see here is a platform that is starting to look like it’s approaching the end of its current life cycle. Having attempted to change process a few times now, the strain of extracting ever more performance out of the current platform is beginning to show. This is the first time in a long time, where I’ve had to drop the all core turbo clock lock setting from the Intel enthusiast range as the overhead simply doesn’t seem to be there at this time to allow for it.

I’ve also retested the common Intel mid-range selection, including the ever popular 9900K. These were amongst the last chips that I took a look a proper look at and throughout 2019 remained popular options, still offering a strong solution where the utmost compatibility is concerned.

However, where the excitement stands then is with AMD’s mid-range in the shape of Ryzen and most notably the previously mentioned 3950X launch. One of the last articles I published last year was looking into the differences that overclocking your RAM could make to the system, with improvements to performance becoming ever more obvious as you increased the RAM clock and tightened the timings.

If you look at the officially rated RAM recommendations that accompany the current Ryzen chips they still outline that 3200Mhz kits are recommended and whilst they work fine, they still result in the performance hole that we’ve seen in previous generations of hardware. Even with the 3950X it remains recommended and whilst I’m sure it’s fine for gaming or other less intensive time sensitive workloads, for high performance audio system you want to be cranking those RAM clocks for the best results it seems.

It’s been discussed quite a lot with this generation that the internal data bus is running around 3733MHz or there about. Having tried it with 3733MHz RAM kits, it does indeed work great, but packs of RAM at that speed are both fairly rare and pretty expensive in comparison with more common speeds.

The 3200MHz “AMD Optimized” RAM packs that are in circulation do help, reducing the performance hit from 15 – 20% we’ve seen previously, down to around 8 – 15%. By going up to the 3600MHz AMD optimized kits we can pretty much remove the performance hole that we saw with previous generations.

So the question comes up, is more, simply more? Apparently not, as going over 3733MHz in a lot of testing appears to be having the opposite effect than the one desired, as it switches the controller ratio to another divider setting that allows the performance hole to creep in again, meaning that just adding a kit of 4000MHz isn’t being advised as a solution.

If you don’t have pre-optimized RAM packs already, fear not, with a bit of RAM tweaking you can possibly clock your RAM up to be more efficent. There is an excellent AMD Ram Calculator tool that I was playing with early in testing and you want to be looking at getting better than 90NS for optimizing your RAM for audio. I was hitting 74NS through manual tweaking of a none AMD optimized kit and 80NS through using a kit with a predefined profile and simply selecting that in the BIOS. For the sake of a few hours work overclocking it and testing, I would suggest that anyone who wants the best from their system pays the little extra for the pre-approved packs and have the hassle taken out of it, as regular packs running at stock settings were offering in the region of 110NS and above which isn’t great for our requirements.

So, testing this time is carried out with that in mind and a few additional notes before I lay out the charts.

All tests done using the current Reaper 6.0.4 build.
All testing done with an RME Babyface.
X299 systems are running 2933MHz which is the optimum RAM for the current 10 series.
Z390 systems are running 2666MHz RAM, again the optimum for the platform.
The AMD systems are all testing with 3600MHz RAM packs with pre-optimized timings as discussed above.
Windows 10 running the 1909 build, which is latest at the time of writing.

Regarding all core boosting, as already noted the X299 platform is simply running too hot for this to be viable without some much heavier duty cooling, due in large to the 260w+ power draw that it requires when clocked up. Whilst my standard cooler can handle it, by the time you’ve ramped up the cooling to that level it’s not exactly ideal for an audio recording setup.

AMD has suggested not overclocking the chips themselves this generation, rather letting the system manage it for you. Indeed, so far in practice I’ve seen that any attempt to carry out a manual overclock will then tend to restrict the RAM clocking we can then carry out. Given that optimizing the RAM gives us far more benefit over adding a few hundred MHz to the CPU itself, we’ve chosen to go that route instead. Our Z390 setups by comparison remain active with an all core turbo setup on each chip and officially rated RAM as the more optimum setup.

With that said about the AMD overclocking, I’ve been particularly impressed by AMD’s own turbo handling in this round of testing, with the cores boosting fairly consistent to all core levels when dealing with busy multi-threaded workloads and then pretty much just sitting there, which in most cases with the Ryzen 3000 series appears to be about 4.2Ghz.

With that out of the way, what exactly are we looking at results wise this time?

DAWBench DSP SGA1566 (2020 Build).

DAWBench DSP - SGA 1566 Test
DAWBench DSP – SGA 1566 Test – Click To Expand

DAWBench VI Kontakt Test (2020 Build).

DAWBench VI Test - Q1 2020
DAWBench VI Test – Q1 2020 – Click To Expand

So, as expected with the memory lag cleared up, we see the performance restored at the lowest latency settings and it makes a sizable difference.

The DSP test, which is essentially loading up each core to see where they top out was always the stronger test for AMD and the additional gains put them squarely ahead now at each price point.

Of the chips tested, the 9600K and 9700K sit at the bottom of the results and given the competition that’s not overly surprising. It’s interesting to note that the 3700X and 3800X are fairly similar results wise, with about 300MHz separating the chips on paper, we saw both of these turbo to roughly the same level meaning that there wasn’t a lot between them in real terms. That means that In this instance the 3700X looks to offer the better value out of these two models and indeed from pretty much the whole sub £500 segment.

Moving up to the more expensive “enthusiast” segment, this is where the AMD’s value lead is most apparent at this time. The Intel chips that we’ve seen look have made the standard 10% – 15% generational gains on the previous models, but the launch of the 3950X really pushed the results in AMD’s favour.

Of course, the performance hole we saw previously was always more apparent in the VI test and again the difference here is clear.

The 10980XE holds its crown in the VI test but not by a huge margin, whilst falling behind in the DSP test, meaning that if the chips were more equally priced then this would be far too tough to call. However, even with Intels price adjustments over recent months the 10980XE is sat around the £1250 price point at the time of writting and looking at the chart and specifically that 3950X in comparison which is sat at less than £700, it becomes clear that whilst the 10980XE is a perfectly fine chip in isolation it really should be £300 cheaper than it currently is in order to make sense in a value comparison with the rest of the market.

In fact, that’s the take home right now. Intels prices cuts should have made them more competitive and to be fair they briefly did, but AMD’s continued monitoring of the market and aggressive counter pricing has left Intel with very little to shout about at this time.

For those old enough to remember the days of the P4 chips and FX64, this was the last time that AMD secured a solid tech jump and dominant market share, right now we find ourselves in a period very much reminiscent of that. For Intel to come back now, it’s going to require that long awaited node change just to keep up with AMD and going forward I suspect that ideally they need a new platform in order to reposition themselves fully, kind of what we saw when the “i” series launched and until then I can’t see this highly competitive era easing up.

Looking forward is always interesting, although at this point I’m not sure anyone can predict how the year ahead will pan out. With much of the first and even second quarter of this year likely to see the entire component industry hit with delays in production and shipping, we might well be seeing shortages across the board for the more popular lines for some time to come. There has certainly been short availability of the 10980XE so far and this is unlikely to clear up anytime soon. The knock on effect has seen the 3950X go through waves of short supply too as AMD continue to try to meet the high demand for its flagship Ryzen chip, although it’s an envious problem to have, I’m sure.

It also means that at the time of writing this may prove to be quite possibly the best time to buy in quite a while, if you can source the parts. With possible supply issues in mind, it could be awhile before it all stabilises again and prices may start to drift if those available supplies struggle to meet demand in the short term.

Intel has 10nm mobile chips out there and more on the way, but it’s all a bit subdued on its desktop range. The already known about i9-10900K 10 core successor to the 9900K is the obvious model of interest but looking at the charts, the predicted up to 20% gains to be had via IPC, additional cores and increased cache are attractive, but I’m not sure it’ll elevate it much above the 3900X a chip that’s already out, established and in easy supply.

Also, notably AMD’s 4000 series were announced at this years CES and looks to be arriving later in the year if they remain on schedule. Crucially this is another overhaul for AMD and it seems like they are well-placed to keep making gains from their platform too, which undoubtedly will apply further pressure to Intel.

The earlier concerns about a limited number of  incompatibilities  have so far not grown and we’re aware that AMD have been working hard to help smooth these out. With the platform not so much “on the map” at this point, as stomping all over it in size 12 boots, we would hope that that developers are now sitting up, paying attention and baking in full compatibility from the ground upwards on future product releases.

We’ve already seen chip prices tumble since the start of this CPU performance war and no doubt it’ll continue for quite possibly a few more years yet.

As we’ve said before the consumer of course remains the big winner in all this. At this point we’re watching the software firms attempting to play optimization catch up as now that more consumers have cheaper and easier access to some absolutely stupendous core counts, it should hopefully lead to more developers taking advantage of this jump in available processing power.

Exciting times and it’s going to be insteresting to see how the rest of the year ahead pans out.

Computer Music - Hardware, Test Labs

Ryzen Memory testing for audio, does it make an impact?

Today we take another look at the Ryzen chipset and discuss further optimization’s. Memory is always a question that comes up and historically it hasn’t really had an impact for audio, where the bottleneck in performance often ends up being elsewhere in the setup.

Even with the previous generations on Ryzen where the optimal memory advised were around the 2666MHz (first generation) – 3200MHz (second generation) clock speeds and in our own testing moving up from 2666MHz to 3200MHz on either generation didn’t get us any favourable results in audio benchmarking, although it did help for video rendering workloads.

As such, I went with the previous suggested the best memory when testing around launch and AMD has publically outlined that the optimum speed is now 3733MHz with a CAS16 timing as this puts the memory on a perfect 1:1 ratio with the internal Infinity Fabric bus arrangement.

At this point 3733MHz RAM is still not overly common, even more, uncommon is the super low CAS 16 kits. I’ve currently got a 3733MHz pack being shipped to me (although only CAS17) for further testing when it arrives, although I’ll keep that for when I do a full retest in the coming week.

The results I have today is more of a comparison to show some basic gains and at a slightly cheaper price point. Above 3600MHz memory carries a sizable price premium and some of you may be wondering what gains can be achieved at what price points.

To do this testing I’ve got results generated using the 3200 RAM used in the previous testing, 3600 RAM with CAS18 which are the standard packs we use here and then I’ve run the same 3600MHz RAM clocked up to 3733MHz, which in real-terms ended up being around 3725MHz running in Windows.

3900X on X570 memory testing
3900X on X570 – Memory Speed Comparisons – DAWBench DSP Test. (click to expand)
Stock CPU
3200MHz RAM		Stock CPU
3600MHz RAM		Stock CPU
3725MHz RAM
64113115116
128118123124
256120124126
512121130131

The DAWBench DSP test gave us some small gains on the 64 buffer and then became much more apparent at larger buffer sizes, where we’re talking closer to 8% at the 512 buffer.

3900X on X570 – Memory Speed Comparisons – DAWBench Vi Test. (click to expand)
Stock
CPU
3200
RAM		CPU
Over
load
Point		Stock
CPU
3600
RAM		CPU
Over
load
Point 		Stock
CPU
3725
RAM		CPU
Over
load
Point
6448070%50070%56075%
128168090%174090%206095%
2562860100%2920100%3240100%
5124020100%4060100%4520100%

What we can see here is similar small gains moving from 3200MHz to 3600MHz, with it being fairly marginal overall moving up at this level.

Clocking the RAM up towards it’s advised 3733MHz clocks in this instance produced us more notable gains with excess to 10% being seen at most buffer sizes. I’ll also note that that between the 3600MHz and 3725MHz results the memory hole started to disappear as the CPU overload point moved upwards. I suspect and remain hopeful when we see perfectly matched 3733MHz RAM with CAS 16 timings as they’ve advised, that we’ll finally see that performance hole disappear for good.

Given that 3600MHz RAM is only about 10% more costly than 3200MHz then that’s a no brainer of an upgrade, but the jump above that to 3733MHz can easily cost twice as much again depending on the quantity and size of RAM sticks that you need.

I’d expect memory costs to continue to drop over the coming months as no doubt many firms will now be ramping up 3733MHz production over the coming months. Our own provider was also on the back foot, having already killed off their 3733MHz supplies due to a lack of customer interest before the AMD launch, it’s only now that they are rapidly bringing back old lines and looking to flesh out their ranges to support the popular new platform.

In regards to overclocking the advice that AMD put forward early on appears to be very true with faster memory installed. In initial testing, I overclocked the systems and ran 3200MHz memory and saw some solid gains. With the faster memory, we see the same if not better gains and we can also run the CPU cooler at stock.

I did note that I had both an overclocked chip up and running with 3600MHz RAM and the memory performance hole pretty much disappeared completely, but the system wasn’t stable under heavy loads an there is no way you would want to run that in a production environment.

Indeed, it seems that overclocking is more or less impossible when taking the memory over 3200MHz at this time, although given the performance boost we see with the faster RAM this isn’t a complaint. This might even improve in the future as the BIOSes get optimized and better high-speed memory continues to arrive, but it’s very much something to be aware of if buying a machine at this point in the lifecycle.

One thing that the results have left me wondering, especially with the closing of the gap as we approach the 3733MHz optimum is has this always been the case. 3733MHz didn’t exist when Ryzen generation 1 arrived and I’m not even sure if it was a widely available product when Ryzen 2 launched. Even now it carries a rather hefty cost premium and I have to ponder is this simply a case of the memory market catching up to the Ryzen chipset.. has Ryzen so far simply been ahead of its time?

The last bit of testing I’m going to carry out over the coming week is to retest with the information that we’ve picked up since the first look. It’ll now be running stock clocks with the 3733MHz RAM that is shipping to us now and it’ll be running a none hybrid test version that of a freshly expanded test setup.

Scan 3XS Audio Systems

Computer Music - Hardware, Test Labs

AMD Ryzen 3600, 3700X & 3900X DaWBench tested – 3 is it the magic number?

The AMD Ryzen 3000 series has been well anticipated and in fact the last time there was this much buzz around a release, it was quite possibly the first Ryzen generation a couple of years back. At that time we saw the platform pull AMD back into the limelight and whilst the results were mixed across many usage scenarios, it was clear the platform certainly had the potential to live up to.

In the interim we’ve of course had the 2000 series, which built upon the gains we’d already seen and continued to close the gap even further. AMD, of course, has continued tweaking the platform throughout this period, acknowledging some of the internal latency issues we also saw in the first round of testing and generally showing positive improvements along the way.

I’m coming to this with a short delay after launch due to a shortage of hardware over the first week. The mainstream reviewers looked to have got their hands on them in the week prior to launch, so there is already a lot of coverage out there regarding the more common applications and the hardware has performed well. The upside of this is that I only managed to put one of the chips across the bench before the launch day AGESA BIOS update surfaced which after applying I also saw a small improvement to performance and so ensured that all testing was done with this in place.

I’m going to be putting the 3600, 3700X & 3900X through their paces here and as normal I’ll be looking to max turbo clock them where I can. This ensures we don’t have a slowest core scenario tipping things into overloading earlier than necessary, but it does mean that on a stock setup you should allow for some variance.

The 3600 for a none X series chip did well, allowing us to take it to a steady 4.2GHz on all of it’s 6 dual threaded cores. The 3700X allowed us to max out all of 8 of its cores at 4.4GHz, and the 3900X managed 4.3GHz whilst sitting around 70 degrees even under maximum load. I managed a 4.4Ghz but not without seeing a huge increase in temperatures alongside it.

Whilst the promotional headlines have been focused on the 7nm die shrink, it should be noted that the entire architecture has received an overhaul in the process with AMD noting a sizable 15% increase in IPC performance. Other notable improvements include further tuning to the internal memory latencies and a sizable increase to the L3 cache, both of which should be beneficial to our performance scores.

For the Ryzen testing, I’m using the X570 Asus Tuf board which was the first of the new range to land in the office. It has been fully updated prior to testing with the latest BIOS and running 3200MHz Corsair LPX memory


With news over the past 12 months of security concerns and various performance affecting patches that have since followed, I’ve set up a new test bench where the Windows 10 build being used is the current 1903 with all drivers being freshly installed. Also given all these changes I’ve benched a number of the Intel chips in this round of testing, with both of the Z390 and X299 boards being fully updated Asus Prime boards.

On top of that reinstall and due to exceeding the benchmarking overhead in the last round with the largest available chips, I’ve made a few modifications to the standard DAWBench tests this time as I suspect that I run the risk of easily surpassing the tests in their default forms.

With the DAWBench DSP test, the SGA1566 plugin now has all instances set to the high-performance setting, running at 24/48 and this gives us plenty of headroom for our needs.

The Kontakt based DAWBench VI test, on the other hand, I would expect to quite quickly outperform with the CPU’s we have here.

I’ve attempted to soak up some of the available performance we have on offer by applying two instances of the SGA1566 plugin in high-performance mode to each of the 16 hidden sine tracks, which on my 9900K testbed took up about 50% of the available performance. This should give us a reasonable baseline to start from and still have the ability to check for any performance affected by latency.

Since the Native KA6 interface has had a generational jump and the older model is now discontinued, I’ve now gone and retired the old testing interface. I’ve now switched it up to an RME Babyface on this round of testing and shall be sticking with that going forward.

Another change is that both sets of tests are being reported using Reaper this time. I completed the testing initially using both Reaper and Cubase, but upon looking over the results I saw an irregularity that sent me back to retest again using Reaper for both sets, more of which I shall cover in the results section.

Having made all those changes, please be aware that these results and prior results are in no way comparable. I’ve changed the following and have retested all CPU’s listed in the results.

OS version.
BIOS versions.
Reaper version.
Cubase removed.
Different audio interface.
Modified DAWBench versions.

The one benchmark that can still be used to loosely compare is CPU-Z and that is where we shall start.

AMD 3600 clocked to 4.2GHz
AMD 3700X clocked to 4.3GHz
AMD 3900X clocked to 4.4GHz
3600 @ 4.2GHz – CPU-Z Bench Test
3700X @ 4.4GHz – CPU-Z Bench Test
3700X @ 4.3GHz – CPU-Z Bench Test

I’ve used the inbuilt 9900K metric as a baseline comparison. I’ll note that the result they have recorded is within 10% of my last round of testing, so it seems quite fitting to use it here.

So first up DAWBench wise is the classic DSP test, running the SGA1566 variant as covered up top.

Dawbench-DSP-Chart-2019Q3-1
Dawbench DSP – Click To Expand

This test sees us stacking up plugin instances on a thread by thread by thread basis until the whole CPU hits a breaking point. An impressive result from the sub £200 AMD and the top end 3900X is trading blows with the £1000+ Intel chips. This test is our raw performance test and as hoped the results are impressive.

The second chart we have is the DAWBench VI Kontakt test, which I imagine is going to be the interesting one for most readers following on from prior writes ups.

DAWBench Vi Test – Click To Expand

And interesting it certainly was. The cross core latency we’ve seen in earlier models has gone on the 3600 and we were hitting 95% on the 64 buffer on the 3700X with 100% leveraged on the 128 buffer, both of which are certainly welcome sights.

The 3900X with its new dual chiplet design was the only model to not come away with a completely clean sheet, although given we have an extra die section to deal with, this might not prove to be a huge surprise. I would expect it to mature in much the same fashion as the other chips below it in the range have done over future iterations and no doubt looking forward to them fine-tuning this new design further.

With the first round of testing as noted up top, I used Cubase 10 initially for the DAWBench VI testing and everything looked great right up until the final test. On the 3900X I saw a 20% performance drop at 64 buffer with 90% of the CPU being used at maximum load and 128 gave me 85% – 95% with the full CPU being leveraged at the 256 buffer and above mirroring the low buffer latency we’ve seen in previous generations.

It’s at this point where I wondered if we’d see any difference with a sequencer switch out, it didn’t help in the previous testing, but C10 had a few major changes under the hood over earlier versions and I’m keen to see if any of those have impacted here. I rebuilt the new test in Reaper and took another look at it with Reaper offering differing results. I still saw a performance hole at the 64 and 128 buffers, but this time it was more like 85% (64 buffer) and 95% (128 buffer) of the CPU being leveraged before it started to top out.

So, interesting to note variance drift between sequencers and how efficiently Kontakt appears to be running within them. I did upon seeing this completely re-bench in Reaper and those are the results presented. but do be aware of the sequencer variance that appears to be in play.

It’s also worth noting that some sequencer may not be able to address the full 32 threads efficiently, even if it can currently see them. I can foresee a lot of optimization being required by various DAW coders in order to ensure that their software can still keep up with the new hardware that is currently emerging.

So, overall thoughts are one of being largely impressed at each given price point. I don’t think I’d drop as low as the 3600 personally, but the 3700X has a strong claim as a superb all-rounder at the entry-level and both of these chips seem to have largely shaken any concerns that remain about internal latency handling.

The 3900X has the noted performance latency still, although it seems to vary between applications and we don’t see that occurring with either the Reaper or Cubase test on the Intel side. I wouldn’t normally be happy with seeing anything drop out at 70% or 80% load but there is certainly an argument that it still offers reasonable value as even then it exceeds the 9900K which is currently sat around the same price.

Certainly, anyone working above a 128 buffer has little to no concern there as it appears to recover in full by the 256 buffer.

So there we have it, a great first outing for AMD’s 7nm design. I’ve seen comments aplenty about the lack of overclocking capabilities and yes we’ve come up short of the all-core clock that I was aiming for in two of the tests, but I do kind of expect that from any first-generation chip after a die shrink. I’ve certainly no doubt that we’ll have refinements over the next couple of years that will successfully extract every last bit of performance from the Zen 2 platform.

My only reservation at this time is compatibility with third-party hardware and mainly interfaces. We saw some compatibility issues with Ryzen 1 & 2 with some PCIe sound cards and some USB based interfaces. ASMedia have a bit of a poor rep on Intel board where they’ve provided their third party USB3 solutions as audio devices don’t tend to play too well on them. We saw similar incidents with the implementation they packaged for the Ryzen board on generation one and thankfully it was less common on Ryzen gen 2.

Ryzen Gen 3 has an AMD designed USB implementation but built around an ASMedia package and at this point, I’ve little idea how it will hold up with all the device we have available. I was testing using a Babyface Pro this time around, so that’s validated, but I would certainly check with user groups for your key devices for any compatibility issues prior to buying.

Looking forward, unsurprisingly Intel’s next refresh details have started to leak across various sites. The Cometlake refresh has a 10 core chip and various price reductions being dangled via those leaks, which obviously look to challenge this Ryzen release when they arrive.

Whilst some people might already be rolling their eyes at this leak timing, those who remember back to the last time we were entrenched in some good ole CPU wars, they’ll remember that this is pretty much business as usual and I can see price wars on the horizon as AMD snatches more and more market share.

But that’s all still to come in the future. Right now, for the time being, the third iteration AMD Ryzen series is easily their most compelling offering yet.

3XS Audio Production System @ Scan

Computer Music - Hardware

Introducing the TW390W – Our quietest 8 Core is also our visually loudest.

Over the past year or so the Intel i9 9900K has proven itself to be a superb flagship CPU amongst our mid-range systems. With the chip having some of the best IPC (instruction per clock-cycle) results that we’ve seen on any platform and the ability to leverage up to 16 threads of that performance, it has proven the perfect fit for many studio upgrades already this year.

Indeed you would have to spend a sizable chunk of cash more in the enthusiast range above it, in order to find a chip that can stand up to this powerhouse. Needless to say, it’s proven to be one of the most popular CPUs we’ve ever supplied when it comes to audio workstations.

When I took a look at the chip at launch, we realised that cramming this many cores into a CPU of this size, there would be some questions about heat dissipation and that we would have to carefully consider the cooling. This caused us to set out and try and construct a new solution for our ultimate 9900K based system and the result is the TW390.

3XS TW 390
Click to expand

So what sets this apart from our other systems?

A few years back I took a look at a number of cases that had appeared that featured bottom to top cooling solutions. Heat rises and given the majority of our noise comes from fans having to force air through the case, the thought process here was one of letting nature take it’s course.

At the time the testing went well, but the available fans couldn’t prove themselves capable and quiet enough for us to introduce them into our system range. Super large fans were still relatively unheard of at that time and of the options available to us back then, none of them had been specifically developed with quietness in mind.

Fast forward back to the present and this design idea has been revisited by a few more case manufacturers and in the meantime, more and more firms have begun to concentrate on larger format fans and specifically making them more sonically pleasing.

The perfect time to take another look perhaps?

Enter Cooler Master in the shape of the MasterCase SL600M.

Click to expand

The case features the required bottom to top airflow with a set of 200mm mounting points at the bottom of the case. We set out to test all the fans that would fit and see which ones sonically would stand up to the task in hand.

We found a winner and they were LED-based. It was at this point that we decided that we’d run with this new case design and introduce our first low noise, windowed, illuminated and overclocked studio solution.


The cooling allows us to run the 9900K at its dual-core turbo, but we have more than enough room to overclock all cores to that same turbo speed of 4.9GHz. In real terms, this means no changing of CPU clock speeds on the fly and that ensures that the power is always there when recording. No concerns here about potentially being caught short by your system power saving as the performance is always available when you need it.

We’ve chosen a board ideal for the task as the model here features full Asus AuraSync functionality. This allows you to have full control of all the connected addressable LEDS both inside and outside of the machine. We’ve set it up with 4 strips around the case and those colour changing fans, but you can also hook up a keyboard, mouse, mouse mats, monitors and anything else that features similar compatible RGB LED’s including the Philips home Hue system and have your whole room sync with the system!

Those fans, however, are not just about the light show. After all with all this power to cool you would expect it to be working hard and generating a sizable amount of background noise. This system, however, is tuned to allow us to run the fans at under 700RPM even with the machine running at a 100% full CPU load and in conjunction with the BeQuiet! cooler inside of this machine, it remains well below our demo room noise floor of 28db/a at less than a meter away!

This is a very, very quiet machine… at least sonically. To see more check out the video showcase below.

The TW390

This system is available now with your choice of storage and memory options allowing up to 64GB of RAM to be included.

You can take a look at the system page and configure your ideal machine here.

Guitar Pedals

Meris Unveils The Hedra Pitch-Shifter Pedal

Meris have unveiled a new addition to their pedal line – Hedra, a three-voice rhythmic pitch shifter pedal which provides a unique combination of pitch shifting and delay effects, allowing you to add some truly lush sounding eternal soundscapes to your music.

Featuring automatic pitch correction with chromatic or key-driven harmony (with selectable scale types), the Hedra let’s you add three harmony voices to your signal, all with dedicated pitch controls for common intervals (3rd, 5th, 7th & Octave). Combine this with tap tempo synced delay for each voice and four individual delay configurations with feedback routing, and you have a pedal that’s capable of taking you into a whole other musical dimension!

Not just intended for guitarists, the pedal’s switchable headroom means it can take instrument-level or line-level signals allowing you to use it with keyboards, synths, drum machines etc. It also responds to MIDI control via note on/off messages giving you more control over the shifted voices.

Features

• Individual controls for Pitch and Time Offset for each voice
• Chromatic or Key-Driven Harmony – with 6 selectable scale types via ALT control
• 4 Delay Line Configurations with unique Feedback Routing
• Unique Keyboard Control via MIDI – puts a live quartet under your fingertips
• Micro Tune – creates gentle chorus-like detuning, classic studio fattening and extreme warping
• Glide Mode – slides between pitches at the speed you choose
• Choose to sweep through Intervals smoothly or hard step for dramatic pitch effects
• Switchable Half Speed and Auto Swell for advanced textures
• Digitally controlled Analog mix control
• Stereo input and output
• Switchable input / output headroom level for Guitar or Synth/Line level
• Expression pedal control over all parameters simultaneously
• Presets available via external 4-Preset switch or MIDI
• MIDI in/out over TRS via the EXP jack (presets, automation, beat clock)
• Premium analog signal path and 24-bit AD/DA w/32-Bit floating point DSP
• Designed and built in Los Angeles, California U.S.A.
• Standard 9V power (9V DC, centre -, 2.1mm,)

More info available here

Computer Music - Software

Microsoft Insider Preview Raises The Windows FLS limit

News that will possibly only affect a small number of users, but ultimately one that will make their composing life better. The FLS limit in Windows has become more and more apparent in recent years as computer performance has improved and the total number of plugins found within any given project has scaled too.

The FLS slot limit (Fiber Local Storage) has always been in place and places a limit on the total number of unique plugins that can run on a system. Multiple copies of the same plugin can share code and run efficently, so the previous limit of 128 plugs was percieved to be high enough for the average user.

The problem we’ve seen over the years is that some plugs don’t efficiently use their resources and can sometimes use up multiple slots per plugin. Some reports have shown that some software can eat up to 7 or 8 slots per unique plugin, so it should be apparent that for users working with large templates and intensive projects that the ceiling was ever looming.

Todays insiders announcement sees a new FLS limit being included in the download and should public testing prove positive we would expect to see this rolled out to everyone later in the year.

The new limits increase the headroom limit to well over 4000 slots, so this new limit should keep even the most demanding user going for a good few years to come!

The official announcement can be found here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/01/09/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-18312/

FLS Slot Limit Increase

As PCs get more powerful, musicians have created increasingly complex projects with more tracks, more instruments, and deeper effects chains. As a result, some of those musicians were running up against a FLS (Fiber Local Storage) slot allocation ceiling that prevented them from loading into their DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) as many unique plugins as they’d like. This build greatly raises that per-process FLS slot allocation ceiling, allowing loading potentially thousands of unique plugins. Beyond musicians, this change will positively impact any application that dynamically loads hundreds or thousands of unique DLLs that have statically-linked Visual C++ runtimes, or otherwise allocate FLS slots.


Computer Music - Software

Steinberg introduces Cubase 10

In what’s become a fairly regular feature in the calendar these days, we see the yearly update to Cubase making its appearance once more as we hurtle towards the final month of the year.

This time around sees us receive a full version update as we move on to Cubase 10. With the full version releases we expect to see plenty of new features creep in whilst the smaller updates and fixes tend to be the focus on the .5 release, so what exactly do we have in store this time around?

Working through the “what’s new” list for interesting updates and the first one that stands out is a revised channel strip promising to extend the functionality and usability of its included modules, with new metering elements offering direct visual feedback for each of those modules.

Mix console snapshots now allow you to set up alternative mixes for your project and A/B compare the results within seconds. By lettings you save your current mix into a tab within MixConsole you can then instantly switch between them at any time, adding notes to each snapshot as you go. You can even mix and match by choosing a part of the mix like the EQ settings from one snapshot and applying them to another one.

Next up we see a dedicated audio alignment tool being introduced, which no doubt is the sort of functionality that is going to be very well received by many users out there.

Variaudio gets its own overhaul with improved workflow and even more creative tools. Smart controls aim to speed up your workflow by allowing direct control of all parameters at each segment. Promising micro pitch level adjustments for smooth drifts and transitions and the capability to push it to the extreme in order to achieve popular extreme pitch effects, this is another tool update that is no doubt going to make a lot of users happy.

Groove Agent getting an update to SE5. Alongside those on the handy plugin side is a redesigned and updated REVerence along with a collection of Vintage Verb settings and a completely new “Distroyer” processor capable of adding subtle warmth or utterly destroying your audio for those extreme effects.

But GUI changes and new tools whilst all nice to have, are not going to be the highlight for a lot of users this time around. For the power users amongst us, the biggest bugbear for the last few years has been the 14 thread limit we’ve been seeing after last years Creators update moved the goalposts for Cubase and how it handles multiple cores, which certainly left a lot of users frustrated at lost performance overhead. Well, the good news is that we’re being promised “significant improvement” this time around, and we’ve heard that they’ve been working on this for a while behind the scenes, so this alone could prove an extremely worthwhile upgrade for anyone running 8 or more physical cores.

The new Latency Monitor in the MixConsole promises to give you enhanced control whilst your monitoring and recording by now displaying both the sum of the latencies and the individual latency of each plug-in bugbear the effects chain viable. This should make it easier to track down any painful lag when working with effects cores in a live situation and should prove to be of benefit to many users.

Side-chaining which for a long time was a bit of a weak spot for Cubase gets another overhaul this time around, with further refinements to the process. The new simplified method will allow you to create the desired routing via just a few clicks by activating the side-chaining in your FX plug-in and selecting the source from the track list and away you go.

Other interesting technical updates include adding support for 32-bit integer and 64-bit float audio formats, AAF import and export options, along with additional MPE support for those users making use of capable controllers.

Productivity wise there is a host of improved “editing to picture” features for those doing sound for film work as well as a  full “Virtual Reality production suite” featuring a whole host of tools specifically designed for producing VR content all the way from the recording to mastering stages.

All in all an interesting set of updates and some much-needed fixes carried out behind the scenes. We’ll certainly looking forward to road testing this edition in the near future.

All Steinberg kit @ Scan

Computer Music - Hardware, Test Labs

Intel’s i9 9900K and the Coffee Lake refresh.

Coffee Lake has been with us now for just over a year and it’s been a rather turbulent period for Intel. AMD’s continued gains over the last 12 – 18 months has marked a change in the marketplace and the first generation Coffee Lake launch perhaps felt a little rushed last time around, especially as Intel was attempted to respond to the opening volley in the now ongoing CPU wars.

This time around I find myself looking over the selection of chips in front of me and the key question on my mind right now is one of “have they managed to extract the platforms potential this time around?”

So, I’ve got 3 different models here all new to the Intel mid-range:

1. The new flagship in the form of the 8 core  + Hyper-threading i9 9900K running at 3.6 with a turbo clock of 5GHz out of the (oddly) shaped box.

Chip is being run at all core 5GHz

2. The i7 9700K featuring 8 cores but no Hyper-Threading. The chip is clocked to 3.6GHz and 4.9GHz out of it’s rather more normally shaped box.

Chip is being run at all core 4.9GHz

3. Lastly the 9600K in another boring box. 6 cores, no Hyper-Threading and 3.7GHz with 4.6GHz on the turbo.

Chip is being run at all core 4.6GHz

So, we see some firsts here and some repositioning in the range. The i9’s go mainstream and in this case, we’re seeing a few notable key differences there. The big one is that it’s the first time we’ve seen Intel put out an 8 core mainstream chip. Given we only got our first mainstream 6 core back on the last range refresh, it’s good to see them again being pushed into cramming more value onto the die this time around.

The i9’s are also promising us solder under the heat-spreader this time around, rather than the paste found in models elsewhere in the range, so this should in theory help with overclocking for those wishing to push them a bit more.

The i7 & i5 models this time around are limited to 8 cores and 6 cores respectively with no hyper-threading. Whilst it helps to differentiate between the respective ranges, it is going to come as a bit of a shock to anyone used to the current i5/i7 naming convention. On first thought, we wondered it this meant that we could expect the new 8 core with no HT to be outperformed by the older 6 core + HT models or not, although this could very well come down to specific workloads.

Hyper-Threading by its very nature is based around stealing unused clock cycles to get more work done, so if your workload is already thrashing the CPU, then having Hyper-Threading isn’t really going to have much of an impact. In previous testing I’ve tended to note anywhere between 20% and 60% gains with it turned on depending upon the software in use, so it could be argued that having an extra 2 real cores, could equate to somewhere in the region of 4 or even more lost Hyper-Threads (once again, workload permitting) and we’ve also got to consider clock and IPC gains here, so playing off the 9600K & 9500K’s against their  predecessors are going to be certainly interesting.

So lets get down to it.

9600K Benchmarked in CPU-Z
i5 9600K Benchmarked in CPU-Z – Click to expand
9700k Benchmarked in CPUz
i7 9700K Benchmarked in CPU-z – Click to expand
i9 9900X Benchmarked With CPU-z
i9 9900K Benchmarked With CPU-z – Click to expand
i5 9600X - Geekbench - 4.6GHz
i5 9600K – Geekbench – 4.6GHz
i7 9700K - Geekbench - 4.9GHz
i7 9700K – Geekbench – 4.9GHz
i9 9900X - Geekbench - 5GHz
i9 9900K – Geekbench – 5GHz

All the standard tests to start with and nothing unusual going on so far. Whilst they are all clocked fairly close together as far as the cores go, you can note differing amounts of L3 cache on each of the chips, which is no doubt going to help a little in both the single and multi-core benchmarks.

DAWbench SGA Classic DSP Test
DAWbench SGA Classic DSP Test – Click To Expand

So on with the DAWBench SGA DSP Test and we can see the 3 new chips in Yellow above. Starting with the 9600K the obvious comparison here is against its predecessor and frankly, it’s a little underwhelming with a somewhere between a 1% – 10% increase depending upon the buffer in play and scaling upwards as the buffer size is increased.

The 9700K is next and we get to compare its new design configuration of 8 true cores and no Hyper-threading, which also appears to come off poorly here when compared against the older 8700K with the results showing up a 20% – 40% drop off against Intel’s own previous generation class leader.

The loss of Hyper-threading here really looks to have impacted the testing on the new generation at least under the DAWBench classic test. I do get the thought process here with the chip design itself, as the largest new segment in recent years that seems to have captured the marketing teams imagination has been the rise in content creation users who are live streaming. True cores for that sort of content generation is far more beneficial, especially gamers who wish to live stream at the same time, so I fully understand this design choice, in fact it could be argued that this style of chip would be preferential for anyone working live but for anyone looking for raw performance in the studio it’s all a bit disappointing so far.

The flagship here, however, is no longer the i7 model, but rather the i9 9900K and it’s at least here where things are making rather more sense. It’s the first time that we’ve seen an 8 core in Intel’s mid-range line up and looking at the result above, it looks to have settled itself just above the 7820X from the Intel Enthusiast range (X299) and to be fair, on paper at least it makes perfect sense that it would replace that chip.

It’s the same core count, a few generations newer and clocked higher, so it was always going to be a contender, what it does mean, however, is that once again we see one of Intel’s mid-range chips start to cannibalize their own enthusiast class of chips. In fact, we’ve now reached the point where the lower end i7 enthusiast class has had a dearth of releases over the last 15 months and largely been killed off, wherein the same period AMD has successfully taken a sizable bite out of that part of the market space too and we see them continue to take advantage of Intel’s lack of new competing models.

Indeed, in the chart here sat above it, we see the large core count AMD’s as well as the older generation i9’s outlining exactly what this test is good at, which is small files being spread efficiently over the all the  available processing space and honestly, the results here once again don’t really give us any surprises as to how and where the chips are being positioned in the range.

Dawbench Vi Kontakt Test Chart
Dawbench Vi Kontakt Test Chart – Click To Expand

Switching over to the DAWBench VI Kontakt based test we see a more interesting picture as the higher single core clocks appear to give us a welcome boost here. In the one thing, it does really outline for us here is that the Kontakt handling looks to benefit from IPC figures all around.

Having the dedicated cores looks to help when working at tighter ASIO buffer settings on both the 9600K and 9700K, although we can see that this benefit disappears on the 9700K once we slacken that setting off to around the 256 buffer. It appears at this point that the Hyper-threading on the older 8700K finally gets a bit of room to breath and flex it’s stuff once you open up the buffer far enough and this in itself is interesting information.

Thinking about this from a live point of view where you’re aiming for the tightest RTL score and quite likely to be making use of Rompler style libraries, this does outline that going with these new chips that feature all real cores might well pay off for you in this situation. However, if you’re working in the studio, the loss performance at the larger buffer settings, at least in comparison with the older generation might once again prove a little perplexing. 

Taking a look at the i9 9900K by comparison and it starts to make more sense again, with it doing rather a good job at once more making the older 7820X chip irrelevant. There is less challenge up this end of the chart from the red team largely due to the lack of solid benchmarks obtained in the last round which you can catch up on if you hit the link. 

What this means is that the options here do seem to be becoming even more divided. It’s been pointed out that the higher latency jobs that the Zen chips were excelling at are applicable to all sorts of media editors still and with each additional chip it becomes ever more clear that these continue to remain very scenario dependent, and that Kontakts way of working tends to favour highly clocked cores and larger IPC figures over the workload being spread out over more numerous but slower cores.  

Before I round up I just want to throw out a couple of additional charts. I didn’t get a chance to do it with all of them, but I did record the i9 9900K at both stock and at the all core overclock, largely so you can see the difference it can make by setting it to the all core turbo.

i9 9900K DB4 all core
i9 9900K DAWBench DSP – All Core Turbo Test  Click To Expand
i9 9900K DAWBench Kontakt - All Core Turbo Test
i9 9900K DAWBench Kontakt – All Core Turbo Test – Click To Expand

Depending on the test and buffer size it’s up to around 8% in these benchmarks, although this can grow as you use more complex chains of processing in your projects. A chip is only really as strong as it’s the weakest core, as once you max out any given core you begin to run the risk of audio artefacts creeping in.

I mention this specifically with the i9 9900K as a lot of premium boards have been shipping with 5GHz profiles now for a few years and it’s rather easy to hit the results I’m showing above with a halfway decent cooler solution. Above that, you’ll probably want to move to a water cooler solutions with 5.2GHz looking to be the target for anyone wanting to really drive it.

I’ll also note that the i7 9700K was running comfortably just below 80 degrees by the time I all core turbo’d  it, whereas the i5 9600K was sitting nicely around the 60 degrees mark even with Prime 95 absolutely thrashing it, so I reckon for anyone wanting true cores only, you might have quite a chunk of headroom there to play with if you want to tinker with it.

So, overall, what are my final thoughts?

The i5 9600K and i7 9700K both feel like a step backwards for our part of the market to a degree. Sure, they have some strengths and I’ll come back to the example of low latency machines for live use again being a prospective user base, but their value proposition in comparison to other chips already out there is where it really falls over in the studio.

Having a sideways move in the overall performance is a little disappointing but we’re seeing an initial street price on the i7 9600K of around £350 against the i5 8600K historical showing of around  £250. Similarly the 8700K was around £350 for most of its lifecycle and the 9700K sits at £499 at launch, so we’re seeing price increases with each of those ranges, although I suspect as supply catches up with the initial demand we may find some price realignment over the coming months and I wouldn’t be all that surprised to see the new chips reflect older price points once the market stabilises. This is a fairly common occurrence with any new chip release, but admittedly it leaves me feeling a rather underwhelmed given all I’ve discussed already from a performance point of view.

The i9 9900K, on the other hand, replaces the 7820X which spent most of its lifecycle between £400 – £500 in the UK and the i9 9900K has landed at £599. Assuming it’s going to drift over the coming months we’re still essentially looking at £100 mark up over the older model.

The DAWBench classic test here shows us mixed gains depending upon the workload and it’s up against the AMD’s which manage to still outperform it within this test. By contrast, the DAWBench VI test flips it with it outperforming the chips on the chart and keeping in mind the Threadripper results previously. 

So, does even the i9 9900K make sense? Well, yes, it’s the one that really does here. With the change to the Z390 platform, we see a cost saving over the older X299 platform complete with a more advanced feature set. With the cost differences between boards often totalling and surpassing the £100 amount, the overall cost of going with an i9 9900K over an i7 7820X looks to come out in the i9’s favour and that’s before considering the performance gains it offers.

The additional good news here is that the other previous sticking point with the Z390 platform for some users is it’s restricted memory capabilities, as the four slots could only handle a maximum of 64GB. We’ve seen an announcement recently however that they are going to start offering double stacked DIMM’s over the coming months to support this platform, so hopefully, it shouldn’t be all that long until these boards can handle 128GB as well.

Overall this feels like Intel’s real response to AMD’s advances last year although given the swift execution and release of the second generation Zen chips, perhaps they are still a tad on the backfoot here. It’s kinda where Coffee Lake should have been last time around and it’s of course good to see more power in the mid-range. It does leave me questioning where exactly it’s going to leave the enthusiast class, as anything less than an i9 on that platform is going to prove to be poor value at this point and given the age of that platform I really can’t help but hope that the next Intel enthusiast platform can’t be all that far off now.

It feels like this is the repostioning that Intel needed to happen to put it’s own range back into some context, but it may not prove to be the change that everyone was looking for, at least in our small corner of the market.

At the very least here the i9 9900K emerges as a rather strong contender for us audio users and I suspect any other i9 based refresh over the coming months is going to make this all make a whole load more sense when the dust settles. But with AMD already promising updates to its own platform and announced tweaks for their memory balancing promised over the next few weeks Intel may have to work even harder over the coming months.

All DAWBench Testing

Audio Workstation Systems @ Scan

Computer Music - Hardware, Equipment & Instruments

Novation Update Their SL Series of Controller Keyboards

Today sees the release of the third iteration of the SL49 and SL61 controller keyboards from Novation. The MKIII is much more than your standard run-of-the-mill controller keyboard with an emphasis on being a standalone centerpiece for controlling all of your hardware!

The keybed is Novations finest, most playable and expressive synth-style keybed to date with sprung action and the highest scan rate they have ever produced. There are 8 assignable faders, 16 tactile RGB pads and comprehensive transport controls for all your bread and butter needs but it doesn’t stop there – 

The new SL series come packed with an extended feature-set including:

• 2x CV, Gate and Mod outputs

• 8 Track Sequencer

• Arpeggiator

• 56 preset templates for mapping popular hardware (new and vintage)

• Chord and Scale mode

• RGB LED feedback

• Routable Clock

As you can probably tell, this makes the new SL MKIII series quite an attractive option for producers whether you work completely in the box or have a studio crammed with expensive hardware. The 5 beautiful OLED screens give you visual feedback on parameter changes. The 8-track sequencer really helps this stand out as a standalone product and opens up lots of DAWless possibilities. The Chord and Scale modes are integrated with the RGB feedback allowing you to instantly see what keys are in the scale – there is also a snap mode which will automatically assign whatever key you press to the nearest in-scale note. The Arpeggiator will be a welcome addition for anybody running synths without a built-in arp, I have a couple of bits of hardware myself which would benefit massively from this alone!

Novations very own Calc gives us a nice little performance video exploring the connection and sequencing capabilities of this exciting new product line featuring alsorts of different audio sources.

For anybody still reading who is really interested in this new release I’ve saved the biggest and most informative video till last…a massive 45 minute deep-dive by Calc. This will no doubt answer any lingering questions you may have in a better way than I possibly could! Enjoy!

SL49 MKIII is available here: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/novation-sl49-mkiii-midi-and-cv-equipped-keyboard-controller-with-eight-track-sequencer

SL61 MKIII is available here: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/novation-sl61-mkiii-midi-and-cv-equipped-keyboard-controller-with-eight-track-sequencer

Computer Music - Hardware

UR22MKII Production Pack limited edition – now available for pre-order.

We’ve always found that Steinberg’s UR interface series have proven to be solid options at their respective price points, normally proven to be extremely capable all-rounders with great pre-amps & signal path, as well as having a general tank-like construction.

Production packs have always been popular with users who are just starting out and with this one we see what looks to be a complete solution for anyone wishing to get started with writing and recording music at home.

In the box you can expect to find the standard UR22 recording pack:

  • UR22mkII interface
  • Studio Condenser Microphone ST-M01
  • Microphone Mount
  • XLR Cable
  • Studio headphones ST-H01
  • USB eLicenser
  • Cubasis LE download info (this is the iOS version of Cubase LE, so user can also use the interface/mic/headphones on an iPad).

But that’s not all! The bonus to be found within this limited edition pack is that you also receive a full copy of Cubase Artist edition 9.5 (including Elicencer) as well as a full copy of Wavelab Elements 9.5.

With the package expected to come in around £342 this pretty much equates to a free copy of Cubase Artist which in itself has a value of over £200, making this a superb deal for anyone wishing to invest in a complete solution to get going.

The package is available for pre-order now and we are expecting to be shipping them over the next few days.

Please be aware that this offer is extremely limited and won’t be around for long!

The UR22MKII Production Pack @ Scan

Computer Based Music & Audio Production