why are TDM plugs double the price of Native plugs?

[drew]

I guess people just can't read.

[SKyflash34]

Originally Posted by ddageek

Great post steve!
Massey and the TDM only Soundtoys are the only thing I 'm gonna miss in my switch from PT to logic

If and when you decide to go AU I'll be there with bells on and wallet extended!

Well you're not going to be missing much then ;-) Steve just announced AU coming in 2008.
Soundtoys has had AU support for a little while I think.

High-end plug-ins for Pro Tools

SoundToys Native Effects - Professional Effects Plug-Ins

[narcoman]

Originally Posted by Absolute

Hey James

Why are womans haircuts twice as much as mens? Same reason. Its about explotation. Its about robbery.

You also have to consider the amount of Native plugins there are. There are so many great plugins for low prices, even some free ones than are better than TDM stuff. Its more open

Interesting you should make such an analogy. Womens haircuts are - generally - more complex and need higher training than mens. When you see men with fancy multicolour hair and interesting fashionable cuts (which you see a LOT less than women) then you'll know that the said man has paid pretty much the same price as a woman. Colouring hair isnt trivial, cutting hair in proper styles is a skilled job. Likewise -as Steve has already explained, the skills required to produce a TDM plugin are more complex than RTAS or VST versions.

Its not that TDM is overpriced - its that RTAS set a lower price point. Same with VST.

[Cabbage]

Originally Posted by narcoman

Interesting you should make such an analogy. Womens haircuts are - generally - more complex and need higher training than mens. When you see men with fancy multicolour hair and interesting fashionable cuts (which you see a LOT less than women) then you'll know that the said man has paid pretty much the same price as a woman. Colouring hair isnt trivial, cutting hair in proper styles is a skilled job. Likewise -as Steve has already explained, the skills required to produce a TDM plugin are more complex than RTAS or VST versions.

Its not that TDM is overpriced - its that RTAS set a lower price point. Same with VST.

It's a fun analogy, and true to a point. The problem is, with the haircut you get something for the extra money (such as multiple colors and stuff) with TDM you get very little for that extra money.

Petter

[drew]

Originally Posted by Cabbage

....... with TDM you get very little for that extra money.

How about a plugin that actually works on your system?

On the cards and using the host processor usually.

[mixerguy]

Originally Posted by sound and form

OK. I usually bite my tongue when I come across this old, tired repetitious debate/complaint. But, all of these usual answers are completely wrong, even the truthful bit about TDM being a lot harder to develop

As someone that sells an RTAS+TDM version of all my plugins for exactly the same price, all for under $100, I think I have a credible opinion and don't have a vested interest in justifying my competitor's pricing policies. So here goes...

Let's start with some historical perspective. TDM is one of the oldest audio plug-in standards. TDM plug-ins have always been "expensive". And, their pricing range has been very consistent since they were introduced to the market. RTAS and other "native" plug-ins came to market much, much later. Emphasizing again, TDM plug-ins have been priced roughly the same all along. Mysteriously, this somehow translates into a conspiracy theory. Those sneaky, greedy plug-in companies are not to be trusted! How could they dare be so predictable and consistent!?

It should be obvious that the question posed is fundamentally flawed. It's inverted. "Why do RTAS-only plug-ins cost so much less?" is the genuinely fair question to be asking. Looking at it historically:

1. TDM plugins came first, and owners of TDM plug-in companies set a price for the product that would sustain all the various expenses of the company.

2. Additional TDM plug-in developers entered the market and emulated the pricing range of existing developers. Like with any business, they understood that the going market value was a proven indicator of how to successfully price a product and run a company.

3. TDM pricing has not shifted significantly until the last couple of years or so, meaning that the market demand has keep pace with the number of new companies entering the market. Most TDM plug-in companies are small, modest operations. These facts support my assertion that the market system has set a "fair" price for the product.

4. When the RTAS/LE market initially emerged, it was very small and extremely budget-conscious. Existing TDM developers had a few options if they wanted to cater to this market:

A. Sell only one product: A TDM+RTAS version at their pre-existing TDM-only pricing.
B. Sell two products. An RTAS-only version targeted at the LE market, and a TDM-only (or TDM+RTAS) version targeted for the TDM market. Additionally, let's assume they would be priced equitably, amortizing the costs across all users evenly based on the product they purchased.
C. Forgo this new market altogether & not sell an RTAS version at all.

A. was obviously a stupid, unrealistic choice. Consumer LE users absolutely could not afford the pre-existing professional TDM pricing. Companies would sell zero additional copies of the product after all that hard work.

Considering option B., here's a rough breakdown of the costs (time) for creating a plug-in. This is very ballpark -- mostly for illustration:

Core development: 60%
TDM: 20%
RTAS: 10%

Again, we assume the developer wants to be completely equitable and amortize the business costs across all customers -- because they are really worried about people ranting endlessly on forums about their pricing structure The above breakdown means that the RTAS-only version should sell for about 70% of the TDM+RTAS version. So, if we have an $800 TDM plugin, then the RTAS version should be priced at $560. But, you say: "Now they can drop the price altogether because they'll be selling more products!" OK, well, they still need to cover the new development and maintenance costs. But, fine, I'll run with that: In the early days, TDM customers easily outnumbered RTAS customers 10-to-1. So, they should have dropped the price to about 90%, because of the increased customer base: $800 x 90% = $720. That means the RTAS would be priced at $504. How many RTAS plugins would a developer expect to sell in the early "001 days" of the LE market, while being priced at $504? Probably about the same as case A: zero. Then, they would have lost 10% of their revenue because of that TDM+RTAS price reduction. Simply put, "Equitable pricing" would not have worked.

So, that only leaves option C: not sell anything to this new emerging LE market. Well, that's pretty stupid too. So, developers leveraged the one great thing about software. It's cheap to duplicate and distribute. They realized they had option D: Sell the RTAS-only version at an artificially reduced price. And, that's exactly what happened across the plug-in market.

5. Time has moved on. The native market has grown considerably. A lot of native-only developers have entered the market. But, they are generally much smaller, 1 to 2 man, operations and do virtually no marketing (low expenses). They are typically selling at a much, much lower price-point, which exacerbates the perception that TDM is "way overpriced". But, nothing much has shifted in the TDM market. The user base is fairly static at this point, perhaps even dwindling. The old-school TDM developer's landscape still looks the same. They still sell to the same professional customers. Sales of their native plug-ins probably aren't great, but they absolutely cannot drop their RTAS-only pricing which would only infuriate everyone further.

So, in short, there are two marketplaces: The professional TDM market and the budget-conscious LE market. If you want a professional customer base, and stay in business, you have to price high. And, if you want to exploit the power of numbers and sell to the LE market, you have to price much lower. TDM developers then also sell an enormously discounted RTAS-only version to pick up a few more sales, but the TDM sales are absolutely what keeps the lights on. TDM customers are not getting ripped off. In effect, they are being subsidized by those RTAS-only sales.

Steven Massey
High-end plug-ins for Pro Tools

good and interesting reading!
thumbsup

[cliff459]

Thanks Steven for giving us your personal insight into the TDM vs RTAS price discrepancy. Personally, I would have thought that the primary reason behind such a difference would have been the fact that any software developed to run on a multi-DSP chip card would have to be very specifically written to interface with the currently running proprietary software operating system on the CPUs already. It's sometimes easy to forget that whatever OS your computer runs is doing this job, and a group of DSP processors that are able to run (or STOP running) various audio processing tasks would need something directing this function as well. But, perhaps Digi thought of this when they developed the TDM cards themselves and "hid" the various un-necessary details behind their TDM plug-in SDK that was given to outside developers to use. I personally have never written any code for a TDM card, but I have written quite a bit of code for fixed-point and floating point DSPs like the ADSP-21xx and SHARC ADSP-21xxx chips so I do know about how long the "debug" cycle for good DSP algorithms can be. Since the TDM cards use the Freescale (formerly Motorola) DSP563xx chips, which are totally different than a SHARC, I will make no guess as to exactly how difficult or costly any of that may actually be for a TDM developer, though. Suffice it to say that the current version of the SHARC code development IDE software will set you back a cool $3,500 USD, and that's before you buy a good DSP development board to use and the ICE emulation box for code stepping debug operations, which can easily double that price VERY quickly.

I am sure whatever price structure Digi chose was based on the reality understood by them, and has proven itself over time. I am no lover of their hardware or software, but it does do some things faster or better than anything else, given you're used to the way it works. Therefore it "pays the bills" for many people, and now seems to have found a new life in the live VENUE equipment as well.

I do find it interesting that I have never seen any promotion they have done that featured any "free" HARDWARE included when you buy their SOFTWARE products. So, that would lead me to believe that the ACTUAL costs behind a 192 I/O unit are significantly higher than the programming of a plug-in!!

[nativeaudio]

Originally Posted by sound and form

Problem is, for the consumer, TDM plugins will probably stay higher priced until the platform swiftly dies out -- when native fully matches it slightly more adventageous feature set. So, everyone can look forward to universally cheap TDM plugins someday! (In the trash bins of Sweetwater.)

Thanks!
Steve

Wouldn't that be a very good reason to give the AU format another try?

I know you had problems with the developer kit (as discussed in this thread). Personally, I know about bugs or problems in almost all applications I've ever used. Even those applications I haven't found any bugs in are more or less regularly being updated with a list of problems that have been solved (and I'm sure most of the bugs that have been fixed are never mentioned). They have all crashed at some point as well.

If a bug or reproducible crash should qualifiy for defining something as defective, and we should all avoid using defective applications or operating systems, there wouldn't be anyone out there using computers at all. Bugs and crashes are frustrating for all of us, and I'm sure they are even more frustrating for developers - but my impression is that it's much more satisfying to develop AUs than VST plugins. This is based on all the critique against Steinberg's lack of proper VST/ASIO support in the past.

That said, I hope Apple will get back to you regarding your requests. I never used your plugins during my many TDM years, but have heard only good things about them. I assume porting them over to the AU format could be very rewarding, since the market for native already is bigger than the TDM market (for obvious reasons).

I've talked to three different Logic developers at various AES, NAMM and Frankfurt shows, and they are all very friendly and smart guys. I can't see why they wouldn't try to sort this out for you, especially now when your problem with the AU Developer Kit is public.

[AKAT-1]

Interesting that people haven't compared the sound quality of the TDM to the Native formats as I think that is what the end user is concerned about.

If paying twice the amount for a TDM plugin gives you a just a 10% increase in quality then I think most people would be happy to pay the extra money in the same way good hardware is not twice as good as ok hardware but we'd still all want them.

To me it seems that with well coded native plugs such as the waves stuff then the TDM Vs Native gap is almost nil and after doing some very basic tests with waves eq's they cancel each other out almost totally even when using extreme settings.

True a lot of TDM plugs are operating at double precision 48bit fixed point which gives greater headroom but with floating point natives plugs headroom is not such a problem anyway and soon I'm sure they will be running 64bits anyway but let me know if I'm missing something...

I hope these formats can co exist to suit peoples needs at least until all the latency and stability issues are at least on the same page and TDM's life as a format is not cut short in the current cheaper is always better climate..

[wildpark]

just watch out how much massey charge for good tdm plugs

and you now how serious the other grab your hard earned money

[hipass]

I would never buy a TDM Plug-in from Sweetwater.
There are ton a great plug-ins for 50-75% (in any format) off the retail price on eBay.

[Dean Roddey]

Some of it is just the realities of a market of limited size, and dealing with a professional market, which has side effects that are non-obvious. I'm not sure how many people Steven has working for him. But if it's just him, then his situation is not something that be used as a general example. My company has this issue as well. We are a small company. We have a product that's as good as the bigger guys.

However, because we are a small company, professionals are iffy about dealing with us, though our prices are lower. But, for them, longevity of the company is about as important as price. As pros, they want to deal with a company that they know for sure will be around years from now. And, how do we insure that? We have to charge more for the product for the pro market than we do for the DIYer, so that we can sustain and grow a company over time. Most professionals are very iffy about the single, lone heroic programmer thing. If that programmer gets whacked by a truck, the company is likely to go away. At best, it's likely to come to a complete halt for a long time until it recovers.

And once you start looking at what it takes to get out of the 'guy the bedrooom' scenario and creating a real company, and you see that you need to realistically bring in many millions of dollars a year, and the market is not a Windows type market of hundreds of millions, but more like one with hundreds of thousands to maybe millions, and that market isn't going to be all yours so you only get a part of that pie, then the only thing that can give is the price of the product, because the market isn't going to suddenly double in size and continue doing so for decades to come.

If you look at a company like Waves, I don't know how many employees they have, but it's got to be a fair number. That's very expensive, but it's what is required to create a company of the sort that professionals have no qualms about committing their studio to, because they know it has the heft to continue moving forward, and to maintain the old code plus continue moving forward with new stuff. It's got nothing to do with the quality of the product, but of the perceived foundations of the company and therefore the longevity of the product.

[nativeaudio]

Originally Posted by AKAT-1

Interesting that people haven't compared the sound quality of the TDM to the Native formats as I think that is what the end user is concerned about.

If paying twice the amount for a TDM plugin gives you a just a 10% increase in quality...

Some people have compared the sound quality, and I have yet to find someone who claims that a TDM version of a plugin sounds any better than the native version of the same. For instance, when AltiVerb finally was released in a TDM version - did anyone comment that it sounded better? Or did anyone ever say that the TDM version of EXS24 sounded better than the native version? I don't think so, and can't understand why it should.

'48 bit fixed' vs. '32 bit floating' means that one version may sound a little different from the other, but I don't think even Digidesign claim that coding something in the TDM format means better sound. I, for one, have never seen Digi state that people should avoid using RTAS versions of their plugins (in a TDM rig) if they want the best possible result. As a matter of fact, some of the new Pro Tools plug-ins are only available as native plug-ins. Structure wouldn't even work as a TDM plug-in due to the RAM limitations on the TDM chips.

[ladyback]

I'll be stocking up on some plugs in the very near future (Altiverb esp) and was wondering this very thing... TDM or RTAS?

So what's the recommendation? If sonically they sound almost identical, why go for the more expensive option? What's the extra functionality? (Sorry if this is a basic question that's been covered 1000 times)

As background, I'll be running PT HD2 on a Mac Pro Dual 2.8 with 6G RAM

Thanks for any tips! GS is the oracle!

[Dean Roddey]

Well, if you have an HD system, then the argument would be you just wasted $10K if you don't use the TDM plugs. That's the whole point of having an HD system, that you are are offloading the processing burden onto the DSP system. If you don't do that, then why would you want to have an HD system? You should just sell it and use a native DAW instead. You could buy a lot of plugs and a honkin powerful box for that.

[nativeaudio]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

Well, if you have an HD system, then the argument would be you just wasted $10K if you don't use the TDM plugs. That's the whole point of having an HD system, that you are are offloading the processing burden onto the DSP system.

It could also be that you want the extra (circa 1 ms) reduction in latency you get when recording. But wait... the latency is higher in a HD system than in a good native system if you don't need to record with plugins on the recording track, which lots of people don't do anyway - so the reason to get a HD system would be to if you record with plugins (on your recording tracks) and want a lower latency - or some of the plug-ins that don't exist on non-TDM formats yet. Or if you use of CPU heavy softsynths, don't want to update your computer/actually need mde DSP power than you can get from a high end native system.

If you don't do that, then why would you want to have an HD system? You should just sell it and use a native DAW instead.

:-)

[s.d.finley]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

Well, if you have an HD system, then the argument would be you just wasted $10K if you don't use the TDM plugs. That's the whole point of having an HD system, that you are are offloading the processing burden onto the DSP system. If you don't do that, then why would you want to have an HD system? You should just sell it and use a native DAW instead. You could buy a lot of plugs and a honkin powerful box for that.

The dsp cards in PTHD also handle all I/O and mixer functions in addition to ADC and plug ins. So no, you are not wasting your cash if you dont use TDM on an HD rig.

You can get a new box and run a honkin buttload of native plugs, even more than going purely native because all the I/O and audio is being handled by your dsp.

So you have more native power for RTAS and VI's.

[Dean Roddey]

Originally Posted by s.d.finley

The dsp cards in PTHD also handle all I/O and mixer functions in addition to ADC and plug ins. So no, you are not wasting your cash if you dont use TDM on an HD rig.

You can get a new box and run a honkin buttload of native plugs, even more than going purely native because all the I/O and audio is being handled by your dsp.

So you have more native power for RTAS and VI's.

$10K for an I/O card and some mixing capabilities isn't a very good deal at all. If you aren't actually loading up all those DSP chips with plugs, it's a waste of money. You can run a buttload of native plugs and the I/O and mixing on a native system for a fraction of the price, with very low latency with plugs in the recording path. Lots of us already do this.

The overhead for I/O on a modern native system isn't very much anyway. It will be all interrupt driven really and asynchronous, as long as you have a quality driver for the card.

So if you aren't using the DSP to run a lot of plugs, then you basically kind of overpaid 5x to 10x for a small hardware assist that a modern native system doesn't really need.

[Dean Roddey]

And of course we all know that paying double the price for plugs contributes to erectile disfunction.

[Edit: The moron Viagra spammer's post before mine was removed, hence my seemingly non-sequitar comment.]

[steff3]

Originally Posted by Jason Poulin

I just never got it.

When I browse my sweetwater mag, I've always wondered why the two are soooo different in price... most of time, it's exactly double the price.

Devs need to live and get money

Well, I think because they can and because there might be different licensing themes for native and TDM ...
I think the really advantage over native is - you can run them without latency - on TDM and Venue ... for some this alone is with the price and more ...

best

[s.d.finley]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

$10K for an I/O card and some mixing capabilities isn't a very good deal at all. If you aren't actually loading up all those DSP chips with plugs, it's a waste of money. You can run a buttload of native plugs and the I/O and mixing on a native system for a fraction of the price, with very low latency with plugs in the recording path. Lots of us already do this.

The overhead for I/O on a modern native system isn't very much anyway. It will be all interrupt driven really and asynchronous, as long as you have a quality driver for the card.

So if you aren't using the DSP to run a lot of plugs, then you basically kind of overpaid 5x to 10x for a small hardware assist that a modern native system doesn't really need.

How often do you run a session that has over 110+ tracks? How about punching in 20 tracks in a session that has over 80? How about analog inserts that are correctly time delayed?

If you never do stuff like that, than lucky you. You dont need PTHD, but for the rest of us that do work on sessions like this, everyday, we need PTHD.

[nativeaudio]

Originally Posted by s.d.finley

How often do you run a session that has over 110+ tracks? How about punching in 20 tracks in a session that has over 80? How about analog inserts that are correctly time delayed?

If you never do stuff like that, than lucky you. You dont need PTHD, but for the rest of us that do work on sessions like this, everyday, we need PTHD.

Not that it's really important, but "the rest of us" seems to be a very small group according to this poll.

[s.d.finley]

Originally Posted by nativeaudio

Not that it's really important, but "the rest of us" seems to be a very small group according to this poll.

Then like I said, lucky you! Not everybody needs a DAW solution like PTHD.
I do sessions of 100+ tracks quite a bit so I do.

You native guys use what works for ya'll. If I didnt need the resources that PTHD has to offer, I'd be native once again. As that is how I first started out in 2000.

[nativeaudio]

The reason I said that it's not really important is that I get more tracks and plugins out of my current native rig than I got out of my HD rig.

The only situations where i've hit the roof is when I try to (just to check how far I can go), and we're talking about using much more than 100 tracks with more than 10 plugins on each of them here - much more than I need. But ... never mind, we're off topic now... and I've discussed this in too many other threads already.

[TheJeffAllen]

The TDM plugs (at least in waves collections) come with both Native AND TDM plugs. That is a main reason they cost more.

[ludaluda]

offer & demand.

[oceantracks]

Originally Posted by Tony Shepperd

Actually Barry it's cool until you have to use one of those tracks when you have plugins on it.
If you have a ton of plugins on the lead vocal track and the vocalist needs to come in and sing an additional line, the second that track goes into record all of your RTAS plugins are put into by-pass.
It's the nature of RTAS.
It's also one of the reasons I hardly ever use that format.

BTW, Massey is TDM and charges less than anybody for his plugins.

That's why we use AUX channels and buss the lead vocal to them

TH

[oceantracks]

Originally Posted by s.d.finley

Then like I said, lucky you! Not everybody needs a DAW solution like PTHD.
I do sessions of 100+ tracks quite a bit so I do.

You native guys use what works for ya'll. If I didnt need the resources that PTHD has to offer, I'd be native once again. As that is how I first started out in 2000.

You can run a 100 tracks in native now, it's 2009

TH

[nativeaudio]

Originally Posted by oceantracks

You can run a 100 tracks in native now, it's 2009

TH

With 125 tracks and 6-700 plugins:

With 255 tracks and 3000 plugins:

[zakco]

Originally Posted by oceantracks

You can run a 100 tracks in native now, it's 2009

TH

Assuming you're also running 100+ plugins at that point, what is your buffer setting then? Would you be able to record new tracks with plugin monitoring and no discernible latency?