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General discussion about music production Discussion concerning music production, composing, studio work, sequencing, software, etc.

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  #11  
Old 15.07.2014, 06:19 PM
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Originally Posted by grs View Post
I might be getting used to not turning on my Virus TI and just loading Spire!!!
If only I had a dedicated piece of hardware that ran Dune 2 and took the load off the CPU of my primary host I probably wouldn't need another synth.
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  #12  
Old 16.07.2014, 08:37 PM
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Personally demoed Dune2 and own spire, along with the Virus which is going nowhere!!!

I have demoed Dune2 but it just doesn't cut it for me. That said I have an array of softsynths. Spire is heaps ahead of DUNE2 with filter and sound selection. Of course thats my personal opinion, others may think else wise. I can see and did hear the appeal of DUNE, but spire seems to deliver better for me.

But then i am someone who has collected a lot of plugins and missed my soul purpose of synths and music. Physical, tactile knobs and keys for tweaking the sounds. Hard to be spontaneous and reactive with a softsynths, ASIO spikes and so forth.
That being said the sound quality between soft and hard synths is getting forever closer!
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  #13  
Old 16.07.2014, 08:56 PM
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There is an interesting Youtube video I saw showing how closely the Spire filter imitated the Virus.

But as far as the Dune2 limitations, when you looked at the demo were you able to see not only the filters in the initial list, but the filter + effect combinations, plus the fact that each of those settings as well as each envelope apply *per voice* to a sound? That's an awful lot of filter flexibility. I'm not sure how much of that is crippled in the demo, I do know that the demo patches they released do not quite showcase it well enough (at least if its the same as when I looked at the demo).

Maybe if you elaborate on what you mean by sounds and filters being better on Spire I might be able to shed light on the Dune 2 angle. I don't have Spire yet, so I am limited at looking at the manual there. Dune 2 seems to be overtaking Spire in the KVR rankings, but then again Spire has been out longer so to some extent those rankings might reflect whatever buzz there is around the latest and greatest release.
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  #14  
Old 17.07.2014, 07:44 PM
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I've been playing around with the Spire demo, comparing it to Dune 2. Subjectively of course, in some tests they are roughly on equal ground, but once I start taking a single OSC and fattening it up with a little unison, getting the reverb settings and tail similar on both synths, Dune2 starts to come alive and use less CPU (on my system at least, running Cubase 7.5) than Spire.

I'm restricting myself to the plate reverb on Dune2 since that's the only type available on Spire at least in the demo, whereas Dune2 gives a much better reverb selection and better sound of the effect itself.

Spire can definitely get fat too, it's just that it starts peaking 15-20% more CPU usage. I do realize this exist only in the demo, the demo has the white noise LFO swooshing going on to restrict unauthorized use but that would not account for a 20% hit.

Comparing only the demo of Spire I have to say Dune2 wins for my particular use. Mileage may vary depending on what how you plan to use it. I don't think I can get the crazy, lush and warm multi voice sounds out of Spire I can get out of Dune2.
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  #15  
Old 20.07.2014, 09:29 AM
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I feel you on the cpu thing.
Recently I upgraded my pc from a i7 950(3.07GHz) to an i7-4770K(3.50GHz)
I tell you the Spire CPU hogging is gone. On the old CPU I would get bogged down if two or three Spires were playing with 5 note chords and unison.
But now I have 7-10 instances open and the CPU never bogs down. So with those ball park instances I am now above my Virus TI voice stealing antics.

Random best things in spire apart form the speed of using it are the multi-band comp in the eq area, the HQ and BAND switches in the SAT section. The MTRX area is clean and easy to read. I can assign a global midi so every instance behaves as I expect. The 'warm' 'soft' and 'boost' in the eq are handy for placing a sound in the mix.

Obvious advantages with vsti verses Virus TI are: Timing. Timing. Speed of loading the vsti vs VC. Vsti s are generated at current sample-rate and sound cleaner when working at higher rates.
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  #16  
Old 20.07.2014, 12:49 PM
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You're piquing my curiosity on what could be causing such a difference between your i7-950 and an i7-4770K.

Do you happen to own Massive? If so, can you try the test mentioned in this thread (there is a link to the youtube video showing the basic idea in post #28 )

http://www.infekted.org/virus/showth...t=33532&page=3

I realize this test does not put Spire through it's paces, but this topic is of great interest to me. My current rig is an i7 870 which is overclocked slightly to 3.1Ghz. I am unaware of what any VST or host could do to achieve 3x-5x the performance on a newer generation CPU, but then again I haven't been following the latest and greatest CPU instruction additions and so forth.
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  #17  
Old 21.07.2014, 12:52 PM
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On the cpu thing, I just update when benchmarks show around double performance gain. Like here http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...770K/617vs1537.
Check the server oriented benchmarks I think they are called Geek Bench.
Their take on the i7-950 "The i7-950 is a first generation Core processor which is now three generations and four years old. The 950 was included in the group test as a reference for how fast processors were back in 2009. "
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  #18  
Old 21.07.2014, 01:06 PM
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On the Massive thing I never got to like it and the pre-sets didn't appeal to me overall
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  #19  
Old 21.07.2014, 02:52 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by grs View Post
On the cpu thing, I just update when benchmarks show around double performance gain. Like here http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare...770K/617vs1537.
Check the server oriented benchmarks I think they are called Geek Bench.
Their take on the i7-950 "The i7-950 is a first generation Core processor which is now three generations and four years old. The 950 was included in the group test as a reference for how fast processors were back in 2009. "
Synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench or Passmark are good at providing a relative measure of certain types of CPU performance, but usually in real-world application scenarios, one typically does not see anywhere close to the same level of performance difference, because to get similar results an application would have to be written in such a way that it's doing the same thing as the synthetic benchmark (and of course most DAWs and VST execute entirely different types of instructions). Synthetic benchmarks are mostly a best-case scenario and designed to highlight even miniscule differences between processor performance, so with a roughly 50% performance increase (synthetic) in CPU performance, I'm trying to wrap my head around how that could translate to a 300-500% increase in performance when using Spire (keep in mind I'm not doubting you here, just wondering if there was something else going on with your previous configuration that could account for the difference you're seeing). I'm wondering if the Haswell architecture has some sort of multi-threading features that newer plug-ins might be able to take advantage of?

There is a benchmark tool called DAW Bench at http://www.dawbench.com/ that is designed to provide a real world measure of performance, but I have no direct experience with it. The Massive test I posted is far from perfect but it's just a quick way to get some sort of plug-in specific performance number. About Massive itself - yeah the presets aren't great but the synth itself is pretty good (and some third party sound sets are amazing).
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  #20  
Old 22.07.2014, 12:11 AM
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I wasn't claiming 300%. There were other factors like the amount of plugins on other tracks etc.
But I would definitely state a good 90% more. The project I was working on had two or three frozen Spire instances that when opened on my new PC were un-frozen and I continued working with more freedom to mix an add more programming and arrangement. This is my real world experience.
A DAW full of plugins may be capable of handing out tasks to threads for CPUs to take advantage of. The new architecture in the i7-4770k has way faster bandwidth to the Memory and a zillion other improvements. I don't have to sell it to you anyway, the only thing is what suits the end user and in my case I always believe in a good upgrade. You see and smell all that new PC goodness and your productivity ceiling gets raised a great deal.
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