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Hi all, now I need your opinions and experiences.
I'm sick and tired with the latency and poor sound quality of Creative SoundBastard card and am about to buy some new cool gear.

First of, I'm going to record many (at least eight) track at once, use softsynths etc, make mixes etc.

What card and other gear to buy? My friend has Pulsar II and it looks pretty nice card. Another friend of mine told, that is it's not very stable and recommended RME DIGI9652 card instead. It should be rock solid and VERY FAST (low latency). For DSP, I've thought UAD-1.

And for multiple inputs, Behringer DDX3216 mixer. Is it a stupid solution to add all these together? RME for using VST-synths and effects, UAD to drive it's own effects and Pulsar for it's nice synths and fx?
Or should I only have PowerPulsar? Or maybe only RME and UAD? Or something totally different?

Confused in the digital jungle,
Sami

Hi Spoimala,
I can't respond to all your points but Pulsar/Creamware is a good buy. Sure there are some irritations as with anything slightly technical but I'd say that there were 1300 happy folks on this website with the equipment that we've got. Plan a bit of contingency cash for other bits that you'll perhaps want to buy too.
And you really can't go wrong with the technical and other support from these members either.
Good luck

hi Sami,

the Behringer will make up a nice IO and mixer extension for the Pulsar if you add one or two of the optional Adat boards.
I've a similiar setup with an old Korg which spares me the Pulsar mixer on screen = no mouse fiddling
You need the UAD only if like exactly these effects, so check it out.
It's said to sound very good, but if it doesn't hit your personal taste, that doesn't help.
The RME for native effects and softsynths doesn't make sense. Once you're used to the quality of Pulsar synths and effects it's really hard to find something native with comparable quality.
Better invest in more DSPs if your budget allows or a good channelstrip for vocals.
just my 2 cents

cheers, Tom

Thanks guys. What means channelstrip for vocals?
Do you mean, that soft-synths from, lets say NI, are not as good as pulsar's own?
And what quality are the pulsar compressors?

It's a fact that I'll play some NI softsynts (especially B4), how is the latency with these with Pulsar? They say that Hammerfall is the best at this.

How about Pulsar's compatibility with AMD processors and ABIT motherboards? Hammerfall is said to have some problems.

Thanks again.

To use VSTi, you need low latency ASIO drivers. At 44.1kHz, the second generation of CW cards gives down to 3ms latency.

If you want to play CreamWare SoftSynths via the hardware midi port, they have <1ms latency, as realtime as most real hardware. All processing from audio streams that are hardware connected are <1ms latency.

The RME would be nice just for I/O. So if you don't need all the effects, synths, mixers and routing possibilities of Creamware, if you feel like VST/VSTi are everything to you, then you only need a card to bring it fast from VST host to your speakers. And the Hammerfall has low latency drivers, as fast as Creamware's.

A voicechannel I think is a pre-amp. It's better to analog pre-amp mic's so they come in your pc at decent levels.

Creamware cards, cos of their extremely dynamic nature, need to load the whole virtual studio on the card (do you want synths, effects, mixers,...). I think Hammerfall will open as fast as a SoundBlastard. The DSP's always do the same, and you can start using your ASIO drivers more quickly.
A 15dsp project takes my comp about 30-50sec to load. A project with only I/O's loads in seconds.

Maybe Creamware should display some kind of warning: "never underestimate the flexibility of"

If you've played with your friends Pulsar, I think you have an idea on how it works. Do you like the virtual studio Creamware is offering?

AMD and Abit... I'm sorry but I'm inexperienced with that. Anyway, what's a mobo/cpu combo's price compared to the price of a DSP card? I think most users here choose cpu & chipset according to the card they have. Creamware can demand huge PCI bandwidth if lots of dsp reverbs are used. If you're curious, check the Creamware Users Setups topic here.

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: at0mic on 2002-08-30 06:01 ]</font>

Yes, I like very much the virtual studio of Creamware. That's pretty clear and easy to oeprate. And also, I like the possibility to use effects real-time (at least I understood so).

My decision will be between
1) RME HAMMERFALL DIGI 9256 + UAD-1
and
2) PowerPulsar

Choice one is lots cheaper and UAD is said to sound good. Now I only need to know, how does Creamware effects compare to those of UAD's.

Also, does anyone know how the performance compares between PowerPulsar, UAD-1 and TC PowerCore ?

You mean how much effects/softsynths you can use?

Yes. (There are not very much softsynths for PC or UAD, but effects)

this is a no brainer.uad is cool,but it's still vst.(not REALLY realtime)

UAD adds latency and is only vst. so you wont be able to apply it to items going through the pulsar mixer.

You are better to get the powerpulsar and the vimco + optimaster compressors and then but a second hand mpx1 for reverb (plug it into your powerpulsar spdif for a decent reverb) or get one of paul tantis when he gets round to selling them again (ive been asking for 6 months).

stick with one solution too.

"UAD is only VST"
Yes, but I can use it in my sequencer (logic or cubase), can't I? Isn't is possible to cross-use both Pulsar effects and VST effects?
It may add latency, but sequencers have some type of "latency-compensation" (I've been told so). And they use UAd in "real studios, so it must work

Vimco and optimaster... are they really great?

If I have to buy additional plug-ins and external effects.. what do I use the Pulsar for?