Booster Board: To buy or not to buy. That is the question

[soylent.green]

Hi y'all

I recently concidered buying a booster board to accompany my pulsar II. But then I thought about security of investment meaning:

1. creamware germany seems to be out of business. I don't know anything about soniccore. But I think they will concentrate on hardware solaris. so will there be good support for pulsar/booster boards?

2. How old/new are those boards? Are they the same age than pulsar I?

3. For how much longer we will see full length PCI slots in Mainboards? If I'd buy me a new pc say in 3 years would I have to use hammer an saw to fit in my pulsar into the short-length ultra-speed pci-XYZ slot

4. Besides soniccore there is indsp - Is any of both concidering a pulsar II successor?

5. Is about 720 € a acceptable price for a new booster board (I don't like ebay)?

6. Are there any known problems using a booster with pulsar II (I mean any, from plugin registration up to irq desaster...)

7. Last question - if you don't concider pulsar a good option for the future. is there a good replacement, mean soundcard, pc-hosted software, which you would like to recommend to me?

Guys, please give me your opinions. Thanks!

Peter

[garyb]

my replies are pretty much the same.

there is no problem adding another card and you'll be able to get pci motherboards for many, many years, likely more than 3. there are still new motherboards with isi slots!

if that price is for a 6 dsp board, PM me and i'll tell you some better news about price.

as far as support goes, nothing has changed, Ralf is still there. repairs are still available. SonicCore are the original programmers of the system who have come home to take care of their baby.

the thing is, what the scope card is and does will be useful for until......there's still no competing product(UAD has some very good devices, but it's abilities are nothing like scope's, PTHD costs 40,000). good gear is never obsolete(think minimoog or 1176 compressors). get off the merry-go-round the computer manufacturers have got you on. good sound is ALWAYS good sound. when you have a machine that does a job well for you, you are done. you may work on making music. the only reason you'll need a more pwerful computer than the current fast offerings, is because there is some new, ridiculously over-bloated program that does what your old one deos, but looks cooler, and you want to run it and it takes the new 5gb quad core processor to handle the extra overhead of the new operating system that runs it which requires 10gb of memory just to turn on. you won't need to get a new machine because your computer can't play 30 or 40 tracks of top quality audio or run a midi sequence, the only reason would be that the old one wore out....

[hifiboom]

how long have we seen isa slots on pci boards?

We will see pci slots on pci-Ex boards even longer.
There are many companies that have huge investments based on pci cards... like servers with pci-controller card and expensive storage system. An upgrade to pci-ex would cost them much money.
Mostly you would not only have to change the card but also everything in behind.

So I`m sure we will see boards with pci slot over the next 3 years.
I`m not afraid looking into the future.

But I think its the right time for sonic core to start developting a successor of scope, else they will sit on a dying product soon or later.

I love the platform, so I have high hopes for soniccore.

The scope card is not replaceable by anthing other.

[faxinadu]

to buy !

[Shroomz~>]

2. How old/new are those boards? Are they the same age than pulsar I?

Our 14 dsp srb has a manufacturers' date of 2006.

5. Is about 720 € a acceptable price for a new booster board (I don't like ebay)?

Yes, it's a very good price compared to those of 5/6 months ago.

6. Are there any known problems using a booster with pulsar II (I mean any, from plugin registration up to irq desaster...)

There's always potential disasters around the corner if you don't do something properly in the first place.

If you get a 'latest gen' Scope srb, set up the system with the srb slaved to the Pulsar2 (P2 as primary card) & make sure you configure your cset.ini for both SFP & SDK. (if you install sdk that is!).

regards,
Shroomz