PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

garyb wrote:6-10 15dsp cards...

Gee that is very powerful then - The Solaris should work well on Xite-1 then? - I've not tried Solaris yet!!!

Sadly Solaris on Xite has polyphony limitations. It does work but it is not optimised for Xite so some of the more complex patches may throw up dsp allocation errors and/or only a low number of voices. I haven't used Solaris on Xite for sometime, and only have Solaris v4.1 license for Xite because John Bowen effectively suggested it was not worth upgrading from v4.1 to v5 for the Xite device as the same issues would exist. I quote from an email from John dated 5th Feb 2010

"There is, however, an issue with the really big synth I made and XITE,
as far as polyphony is concerned, and this will affect the Solaris
plug-in (updated or not) and the Quantum Wave (which you are not using).
It seems there are too many connections internally (which I cannot
reduce or alter, since that's part of the flexible design), and these
connections require some special handling. You can load the Solaris
plug-in several times in XITE, with each instance play 3-4 voices, but a
single loaded synth still is only 3-4 voices. It's very strange to me,
but they explained things a bit, and there's nothing on my end I can do."

I remember feeling a bit put out at the time as I felt the early adopters of XITE had not been told about these potential issues with some devices, and transferring the devices was a pain at the time. Luckily though, sometime later on SC had a sale including the Zarg bundle so I was able to purchase that for one of my 15 DSP PCI cards and once again have Solaris on PCI

Ah OK - I see - But it works 100% on the PCI cards then? - But you need 15 DSP just to run it properly, I get it!!!

So with a DSP expander 14/15 DSP or Scope Pro 15 DSP with another card such as Power Sampler 3 DSP with a skeleton Scope Project it would be possible to use this Solaris to good effect - so a system with 18 DSP would do OK!!! - Thats great!

The Solaris 5 works polyphon with my 3 x 15 dsp cards and it depends on the patch. But the result of the very complex Solaris sounds is not coming out of hell. For me it would not be worth to buy 3 cards and a Solaris to get that sound. But it really depends on what you want. Maybe you want to be a scientist to make use of it. But musically it is not necessary to have such a complex music machine which came directly out of hell.

Some workarounds for getting more out of Solaris and QWave on XITE : http://www.hitfoundry.com/issue_26/sol_mast.htm