Review of Xite-1 at Musikmess 2009

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Anonymous

Topic Posted on 04/05/2009 at 04:59:14

Xite is 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...

Xite is a pci-e 1x audio card with virtual analog modelling, synths, effects, mixers, and powerful routing abilities, and more. It has been tested with pci-e cables of more than 10 meters, and still has to be tested to find the maximum cable-length.

Those who know sonic core "Scope technolgy" on the old PCI board know that it is a 10 year old technology which has not been surpassed since then, or if it has, well that's only by Xite-1.

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)......

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.

The STS might work better when using windows XP rather than Vista (apaprently it works fine on XP, but can have some problems using the whole memory of Vista 32bits). This will be solved later on, as Vista is not a system that is adapted for anything and will be replaced soon. That's why Vista specific development has been put on hold, and let's wait for Window 7 because things that can be important for Xite might change.

It was fun to see the new Hardware i/o modules like headphone outputs, and preamp inputs. For the rest, Scope users will feel at home with the ADAT Source/Dests, Asio, GSIF, etc etc.

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 to have backward DSP compatibility, and still have ways to optimize and make things more powerful in "Xite-Native mode", which is the future of Xite (not its present, because the present is to be able to run Scope5 on both hardwares: scope PCI and Xite PCI-e)...

For the price, I don't think there is anything as powerful in term of real-time sound management and virtual modelling. With all the synths one can load, the high quality mixers and effects, it is much more powerful than anything at this price range, with flexibility.

Add to this the power of all your vstis/sequencers/samplers/external gear.... and you make your PC/Mac the most powerful synth workstation+studio card that i've heard about (and i read the news everyday), which can be mobile too.... that's why it is now possible to build a studio project, and bring the exact same setup for live performances.

Get xited ;-)

NB:
availability: unknown
price: refer to sonic core and/or there distributors.

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