Just been doing a bit of research on Noah, and was quite surprised to find that the retail price at Musiciansfriend for the regular version is now at about $1200. See link below:
Seems like this may have happened quite recently, so CreamWare is obviously pushing this pretty hard. In combination with the positive magazine reviews, I think the timing is pretty damn good...
curiously, no official announcement about the change in price. I bet a lot more people will consider it at the new prices. I would love to pick one up (if only I had not been ripped off and left with no money to spend by a former Creamware dealer).
The firewire Powercore has twice the power of the PCI card but Noah doesn't seem to have enough.
I think Noah should have been 11 DSPs and the EX version 15 DSPs.
The reason I say this is that I'm going to get a Powerpulsar in the next few weeks and could have spent the money on a Noah but would get far more use our of a 15 DSP card even though it won't come with six string and the gimme five promotion.
Sorry you got ripped off by a former dealer. I even bought a card from the same guy, and it took forever to arrive. But I guess at the end of the day that's not really CreamWare's fault.
About Noah, I think since it's a dedicated hardware unit the DSP overhead is actually less. The devices were optimized to run on it, so I'm not quite sure if all the extra chips are necessary. The real test will be to hear what it sounds like by playing with one.
About the Powercore, well, I've got just one question: where are the synths? Without the arsenal available for CW cards, the Powercore is not even in the same class. CreamWare is definitely ahead in the 1:1 modelling arena. That's quite a bit of ground to cover, for any company.
I didn't mean to compare Noah and the firewire powercore I know that they are very different animals. I love creamware gear and I will continue to buy their products.
Your probably right about the DSP overhead being lower but in the end it would have been cool to see a real powerhouse Noah. One that can run more that 2 minimaxes with some polyphony. It would certainly have got my money.
External DSP boxes could be the right way to go in the future for Creamware as PCI cards must be a bit of a hassle to write software for and make them compatible with all the different versions of Windows and motherboards etc.
If CW had included the latest SHARC chips from AD, they would have had a LOT more power for the same amount of chips. How much more expensive are the new chips?
I think since the OS in Noah is smaller, less overhead is taken by that process. What is cool is that new devices can be added later. Hmmm, kinda leaves most synth companies in the dust.
Adding DSP would have been cool, but that could still happen to future models.
It's always easier to code, compile and debug for a known device. Since all the synths were coded on the old models from AD, would you as a programmer throw some untested new technology at it? I'm guessing, that probably would not happen.
