I just came back from Musikmess, and as usual it was great to meet everyone from S|C and John Bowen and Warp69 and many other people from other companies too (sugarbyte, prosoniq, NI, and others....). I would have liked to meet other Scope-related-people who were around but who were not there at the same time as me, next time may be... I really had a *Great* time... a few hours once a year is really not enough (especially when waking up at 5 and arriving there not in my best shape, and become quite "zombi-stic" at the end of the afternoon), i couldn't stay longer unfortunately, and enjoyed every minute of it.. may be i should also join namm shows
The Solaris has well evolved since last musikmess: I only saw pictures recently, from Namm and such, but seeing it for real makes a different impression, the sound of some oscillators functions like the drive of peaks (i don't remember the exact name of the parameter right now) etc have excellent sonic results, very high grade design with new engines and such....
The 96khz sampling rate, added to the new engines and R&D for Solaris, makes it a really fantastic synth, with deep design/routing possibilities.... It is not a "one button does it all" , as there is a lot going on in terms of routing, oscillators, filters, modulations.... It is deep, not that complicated, but you have to take an hour or two to understand all the functions and how it is made, and I didn't have all that time, and neither did John who needed to answer visitors' questions.
Xite is also a fantastic DSP studio audio card. Last year, the box was not finished. Now it is completely done, with thick metal and it's pretty heavy too... it is not an empty box made of plastic, it really deserves to be shown and it actually looks better in real than in the pictures... Under the hood, all seems to work fine: i was playing 16 synths layered together, (all the prodissey, minimax, pro12, lightwave, Solaris plugin, etc etc).... all connected to a STM mixer , and the dsp meter was slightly more than 50% with some synths being polyphonic (i didn't check the voices, was too buzy muting/soloing this or that to make a new sound to play pad chords)... In terms of interface, what is running for Xite at the moment is Scope 5 which is compatible with the PCI boards and the Xite (at least for the most part because, in xite users can allocate themselves devices to particular dsps .. and i have not asked if this function is available to Scope-PCI (it would be normal if it is not, and a cherry on the cake if it is)...... Because Xite can run all current scope Plugins with no problem. I even loaded a FP mixer and it was running great: i didn't look at the dsp meter when i loaded it, but i guess it is not something that really counts.
It was fun to see the new Hardware i/o modules: headphone outputs, and preamp inputs (edit: i said previously they were seperate, but they are together... as you see i was not in my best shape and beleived for a second the mono premaps were stereo

)...... .. It will certainly be possible to make a studio project to be a live project, without the need to decide what you will keep/remove for a live perfomance... I am pretty sure I can finish a relatively ambitious project at once, in terms of number of devices/synths/mixers/effects... . Also, if today the Scope 5 interface is more or less common to Xite/Scope, I understood that Xite can also use a new architecture for distribution accross dsps, which could allow even more power.... It is really amazing... Add to this the power of all your vstis/sequencers/samplers/external gear.... and you make your computer the most powerful synth workstation+studio card that i've heard about (and i read the news everyday), which can be mobile, and which deserved to exist for a long time now.....
If you are of the kind of guy who will also add a Solaris hardware to your setup, then you could be selling gear when those two hit the market...
Get xited

Mehdi