Ben Walker wrote:One thing I didn't understand about the review was some new feature called 'Load Lock'. As described in the article:
If Load Lock counteracts the effect of switching turning sections of a plug-in off to conserve DSP, then what would be the point of switching off the section in the first place? Maybe you'd turn off features of a plug-in for some other reason, but not to conserve DSP with Load Lock enabled.A number of the UAD plug-ins can have sections disabled to conserve processing power, but if you use too many of these, you can find yourself in a position where enabling previously unused plug-in features pushes you over your hardware DSP usage limit. If you find this annoying (as I do), enabling Load Lock forces the cards to ring-fence the maximum DSP power that your active plug-ins might need, irrespective of whether you're currently using them to their full potential, so you don't find yourself running out of power just as you're putting the finishing touches to your mix. Naturally, this will normally give you fewer plug-ins, as each plug-in always hogs its maximum DSP quota.
Well, it's pretty much like having Scope plugins which have dynamic dsp loading/offloading based on whether certain sections are switched on or off. Many Scope devices have this feature. Take for example an STM 2448 mixer which dynamically switches sections like EQ, Comp etc on & off DSP when you are actually essentially bypassing them in the mixer circuit. What a Load lock type feature in that case would be doing is making sure that all mixer sections are loaded on dsp despite whether you have EQ, Comp etc sections bypassed or not. It's basically just a feature to bypass the dynamic dsp loading of all sections or in the UAD's case, all sections of all loaded plugins.
Mark
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