Duende first impressions (looooooong post - no info)

[preben]

Got mine yesterday and have now played around with it a little while... I've just re-read my post and should probably have spent more time playing with the Duende rather than writing this enormously long post. I apologize in advance and warn you: it's like reading Slipperman's entries only without the insights... Great - I bet you can't wait...

First of all on the technical side there are certain problems here and now, such as in Logic the bypass switch on the plug doesn't work and there are issues with offline bouncing such a small dropouts sometimes.

I am not surprised by this - the software is version 1.0.0 and I am sure that an update from SSL's website is very much on the cards - the fact that the installer from the cd in bright read colours suggests that you check the SSL website for updates prior to installing seems to indicate as much.

So please let us not turn this thread into 'the should have fixed it prior to release' SSL-bashing. We all know how these things work with logistics surrounding shipping etc etc and from what I'm told firewire is a notoriusly fickle beast to tweak in relation to things like this. And the only reason I am mentioning all this here is for the benefit of those of you who need to have something that works NOW due to deadlines etc. I suspect a week or two will change things quite a bit.

Amongst the good news is that at least on my system the Duende seems to be happily co-existing with my powercore pci mk1, powercore pci mk2, powercore firemire and UAD-1 cards. Given the history on some systems of problem between the TC and UAD cards, I was a little concerned that the Duende would throw another dsp-card spanner in the mix but my initial observations are very positve.

Also the Duende doesn't seem to introduce too much added idling-pressure on my G5. I haven't tried maxing everything out 100% but on a project with all my powercores AND the UAD-1 maxed out using about 65% of the power on the Duende everything played along just about as it did without introducing the Duende. Apart from an obvious addidtion to the sound, that is.

Baring in mind that this is very much a preliminary rapport and that I haven't been mixing with the Duende as such but only 'knobbing about' my first impressions are that it has a sound that I would desribe as similar to the Waves SSL but with more depth, punch and weight. I haven't worked enough on SSL desks to say whether this is due to the modelling talent of waves versus SSL or it's the difference between the 4000 series and the 9000/C200 take on things but the Duende reminds me more of the Sony Oxford especially in the way it deals with transients - which for me has always been one of the great things about the Sony Oxford stuff.

However it doesn't sound like the Sony Oxford per se... it's just a generic way of trying to describe the difference in feel. Those of you who remember some years back will know what I mean when I say it reminds me of the difference that (used to?) exist between Native and TDM - there's just a solidity about the Duende/Sony stuff that to my ears is less obviously present with the native stuff. YMMV and this might well be down to me not having the right native plugs in the first place...

The eq has a very analogue sound (here we go again... sorry.,!!) by which I mean that it just sounds like you're adding more top end rather than tweaking an eq and the phase smear that happens sounds very 'natural' and analogue to me. And the sonic difference between the two types of eq included is obvious.

The channel comp. to my ears has quite a bit more punch than the Waves - again espcially noticeable on more dynamic source material with loads of transients (drums, bass, acoustic guitar etc) and is as you would expect VERY easy to work with. Sure there will be times when the attack settings are either too fast or too slow and as we all know there is no in between here... but hey, that's why we've got different plugs.

The buss comp sounds like I would expect it to. Slightly 'bigger' sounding that the waves - whether it will hold its own against the real thing time (and no doubt countless a/b-ing) will tell. But it sure sounds like an SSL bus comp - or at least like a digital version of it

All in all I am very excited by the SSL Duende. Being on a Dual 2gig G5 which I tend to spank quite heavily when I'm mixing, I am happy I held out for The Duende and didn't get the waves plugs. The Duende isn't the be all and end all, but I think it's quite a significant step in the right direction for us ITB people.

I'm sure that as it's always the case with emulations certain colours in the sound will emerge after a while that in some years will make us recognize the Duende sound and possibly question how we could POSSIBLY live with that for making music. I still remember people running out and selling their Fender Rhodes pianos when the DX7 came out. I also remeber myself selling my Blackgace Deluxe Reverb because it was obvious that the Mesa Boogie Quad Preamp and power amp into 2 EV's sounded exactly the same - if not better.... It just NEVER sounds just like the real thing does it - not for very long anyway...

But for now it sounds fantastic and I can't wait to incorporate it properly. One of the things that really struck me when demoing the Waves plugs was how quick they were to work on. The Duende is obviosly the same - it's the same interface (more or less). In a way the 'problem' with the Sony stuff is that they can do almost everything and are so tweakable that you can get lost in them. On the plus side: when you know them well they can do a LOT of different things. The Duende only does the SSL thing, but.....

[TheTruffleKing]

You are a tool of Satan to be tempting us poor sheep thus.

[RainbowStorm]

Originally Posted by TheTruffleKing

You are a tool of Satan to be tempting us poor sheep thus.

What a reaction!

[hitsville]

thanks for the review!

[Slogun]

I really hope mine will drop in next week. Seems like I don't want to start a new project 'till I've got the Duende to strap on the channels

[Solar]

Hey Preben!

Thank you so much for taking the time to give us your feedback about this TOOL. Really appreciate and i can wait to hear SSL anounce the PC version and hope also that in that time they will have the Software upgrade to 1.2 or 1.5 to fix those little buggs. But i'm way sure that a HARDWARE like this can not really hurt. And espcially for the price, i think its right on the money!

Can you tell us a bit more, does the E channel, or the BUS comp etc.. comes with Presets already given to play with or just as a REAL console?

Looking forward for the PC version to be released!

Thank you again

[audiomichael]

Thanks for the pre-review. Are you going on impression with the Duende / Waves comparison. Or are you A/Bing the plugins?

[preben]

I'm going on impressions from when I demoed the waves stuff - don't have it anymore as I decided not to buy it.

[AnalogBob]

Does it saturate the signal as it get's hotter like people has reported the waves bundle does??

[audiomichael]

Originally Posted by preben

I'm going on impressions from when I demoed the waves stuff - don't have it anymore as I decided not to buy it.

I'm dying to hear an opinion from someone A/Bing. I know from my experience that when I get a new piece of gear, my excitement gets the best of me. I was demoing the PSP Neon EQ plugin (which is very good). I was so impressed that I was gonna sell my Massive Passive!!! Until I did an A/B and realized that the MP still blew it away.

[preben]

No presets - like in the real world you'll have to roll your own

[dudleys100]

Nice. Looking forward to hearing more reviews

[upscaps]

interesting review. def interested in hearing some more waves ssl/duende comparisons. hardware vs plugin comparisons always end up....

[bdunard]

The SSL web site says it offers 32 channels of plugins.

Can you run 32 channel strips at once?

Is the mix bus compressor more CPU intensive than the channel strip?

[the1Hub]

Originally Posted by bdunard

The SSL web site says it offers 32 channels of plugins.

Can you run 32 channel strips at once?

Is the mix bus compressor more CPU intensive than the channel strip?

yes it will run 32ch strips at once it is limited to that amount. i am not sure how many buss comps you can run. i had the pleasure of playing around with it at tape op running on a powerbook g4 with protools le/002r. it did add a very insignificant amount of cpu(powerbook) usage when the plugs were active. as for the duendo itself it seemed to run very stable as far as passing audio through all 32 ch strips and the buss comp on the mst fader. but there were a couple of gui issues., neither were deal killers but did add a slight amount of anoyance to using the plugs. first was not all controls displayed a value setting as you adjusted the knob. not a big deal we all have ears right? the second was much more bothersome. the metering in ther channel strip seeamed to take nearly a second to update as you made changes, agian as long as you use your ears its fine, just not the quality i would expect from ssl. as far as sound goes it would be impossible to make an informed conclusion as the listening enviroment was less the ideal (headphones/noisy room) the price was right around 1600 us

looks

[DrDeltaM]

It has 32 'slots' at 44,1kHz or 48kHz (16 'slots' at higher sample rate). Each channel strip plugin takes one slot, each buscompressor takes one slot. So combine at wish

[Jules]

Thanks Preben, your Native Warrior in the trenches reports are ALWAYS appreciated.

[T_R_S]

Do they include the RTAS wrapper? Or does it cost extra?

[DrDeltaM]

Originally Posted by T_R_S

Do they include the RTAS wrapper? Or does it cost extra?

Included, automatically installs.

[Slogun]

Originally Posted by T_R_S

Do they include the RTAS wrapper? Or does it cost extra?

Think it was someone from FXpansion who chimed in on another Duende thread here on GS and said that their wrapper technology was included (for free).

[edit] DeltaM, you beat me to it [/edit]

[Sergievsky]

Doesn't the lack of delay compensation in PTle makes the Duende difficult to use?

[DrDeltaM]

Originally Posted by Sergievsky

Doesn't the lack of delay compensation in PTle makes the Duende difficult to use?

The lack of delay compensation in PTLE makes it difficult to use any 3rd party plugin for mixing.

[bobdemaa]

cut

[T_R_S]

Originally Posted by Sergievsky

Doesn't the lack of delay compensation in PTle makes the Duende difficult to use?

Nudging a track is not difficult. Did it for years with Mix. Back then delay reporting had bugs in it with many PI, so you had to measure each PI - now that was difficult.

[GGreen]

To confirm ,

The wrapper is included and is an automated part of the install process so is effectively totally invisible to the user.

Install Duende , and the wrapper is installed.

Please note this wrapper only wraps these plugins , it is not like the normal wrapper that can be used with ANY vst

GFX

FXpansion Audio UK Ltd

[preben]

Having had a bit more time to use the Duende now I can honestly say that I am very impressed with it. It crunches away nicely and has a very solid feel to it sonically.

After reading all the reports about firewire issues I tried maxing out my system to see what happened.

I am able to max out the Duende (28 mono channels and 2 buss comps) AND all my powercore stuff flat out (pci mkI, pci mk II, firewire) AND get the UAD-1 up to around 75% (which seems to be where that particular item stops being happy on my system which is a Dual 2gig AMD 8131 G5) and everything is playing along nicely with no real issues such as the clicks and pops that some people are reporting. I've even got a firewire lacie hard disk daisy chained to the powercore firewire - although it is NOT being used for audio or for any heavy streaming of samples.

Obviously when everything is running at full pelt the taxing on the G5 natively is noticeable - probably around 30% or so... but it's also quite a lot of processing that's going on by then. And it's really quite amazing what running 5 finalizers in serial does to your mix

I strongly suspect that part of why this is working so well is the fact that I am using the G5's own optical audio i/o's, thus not using any third party audio drivers and, perhaps more crucially, not using firewire bandwith for audio i/o.

With all pci slots taken up in my G5 a firewire pci card wasn't really an option, so it's no less than GREAT that it works without one. The Magma route is one I'm not really prepared to go down at this junction...

[Geert van den Berg]

Originally Posted by Sergievsky

Doesn't the lack of delay compensation in PTle makes the Duende difficult to use?

it's still a pain that LE doesn't have ADC but if you'd use the Duende with it, the latency could be battled a bit by using a channelstrip on every channel giving every channel the same latency.

LE only has 32 channels anyway. Though you'd probably use the busscompressor too 2 times on auxes maybe, so then you're stuck with 30 channels.

But the latency isn't so hard to calculate and then you'll only have to nudge the channels without Duende plugins and maybe the channels which also have other processing, though if it's not a multi-mic source (like drums) I don't bother doing this is if it's just a couple of samples.

[Slogun]

Got mine earlier this week and all I can say is SWEET
It's a really nice complement to the Sony Oxford plugs on my PoCo firewire. And btw. mine isn't buggy either, although I haven't tried maxing it out yet.

[not_so_new]

So how much are these things? I can't find a US dealer to get an idea of what the price iis U.S.... any ideas?

[not_so_new]

Okay maybe I am nuts but I did look around and I can't find any price at any site so this is a bump.... How much is the Duende going for in U.S.? Anyone?

Thanks.

Oh and maybe a link to a retailer or something?