planet Z

i got my pulsar developer's board today, i've been playing with it for a couple hours and i'm super-impressed. for those of you who don't know about the pulsar, see http://www.creamware.com/ -- it's a pci card with 4 sharc dsp's on it, stereo analog i/o, SPDIF i/o, 2 sets of ADAT i/o. they use the dsp's to provide "zero-latency" mixing, onboard fx (compressors,limiters,flangers,chorus,etc - no reverb yet), as well as (and this is what i'm excited about) a bunch of synths - analog modelling, FM, AKAI sample players, and most exciting, a flexible modular including (among other things) a waldorf wavetable oscillator module.

after installation (zero problems, totally easy), and bringing up a few projects, and enjoying the various synths, i plunged into the modular. woooohoooo! i set up a patch with a waldorf oscillator going into a pretty nice resonant filter, with an amp envelope, and an LFO wired to the startwave of the oscillator. bingo, another microwave!! well, ok not quite, but it sure is fun. the lowpass filter doesn't sound as nice as waldorf's, tho it does self resonate when maxed out. i'm hoping wolfram will tell me that waldorf is planning a Waldorf Multi-filter module for the pulsar. pleeeeaaase!!! 8^)
anyway, next thing was to throw on another oscillator (their multi-osc which lets you do various kinds of saw/sin/pulse shapes) and layer it up with the waldorf. ok, then (obviously) add another waldorf oscillator - what's cool is that each waldorf oscillator has its own wavetable selection (unlike on the uWave, where you can only have one wavetable selected). so, here i have a 3 oscillator synth (two of them are waldorf wavetables), and i can take it up to 7 or 8 voice polyphony. when i started adding more stuff - like a different filter for each oscillator, and multiple LFO's to drive various parameters like the waldorf oscillator startwaves, i then had to decrease the polyphony to avoid running out of DSP. unfortunately, this is a 1.0 release, and there are still some bugs. sometimes when i ran out of DSP, it would pop up an error, and it would glitch a bit. once, it crashed hard, and rebooted the pc (i hadn't saved yet either!)

their modular editing environment isn't quite as nice as Mark Pulver's wall 8^) nor the Nord modular patcher (which i saw at a friend's house). it isn't as mature as the Nord (yet), and still lacks some stuff like little step sequencers and the like. also there are only a few filter types, etc. but overall, it's an awesome start, and the available modules are more comprehensive than i anticipated.

another cool note: you can use any external midi controllers to control any of the synth/mixer parameters. i tried this initially just to wire a mod wheel to my modular patch filter cutoff. worked fine. next is to make some Peavey PC1600 control patches. as you tweak externally, you can see the knobs turning on the screen. very nice.

their whole editing environment is incredibly memory intensive. i have 64mb, and i'm swapping like crazy. i just read in the manual that 64mb is the absolute barest of minimums, and that 128 is recommended. ok, time for an upgrade! i'm sure it has to do at least in part with their absurdly beautiful graphics environment: one really nice, sexy feature is that a window panel will become semi-transparent as you drag it around, so you can see what's behind it. very cool - never seen that before.

the latency on the synth patches is unnoticeable -- iow, i have my midi keyboard plugged into the pulsar and am playing the pc just like a synth. it works extraordinarily well. indistinguishable from playing a standalone synth (in terms of how it feels when i play). this certainly wasn't true for other computer-based synths i've tried (albeit those were all software synths, and this one is sharc dsp powered).

so, that's an overview of the synths. i haven't even tried integrating it with cubase vst yet - tho they promise that's gonna work really well. it'll be interesting to see how effective it is at piping hd audio from cubase into the pulsar mixer, and adding effects, etc all while playing some synth voices too. somehow, i think it's not gonna have enough steam to do all of this at once. (the next sw release is going to allow chaining multiple pulsars, heheheh) if anyone's interested in a 2nd part of this review (discussing my impending experiences integrating with cubase vst, and using pulsar's mixer/fx), lemme know!

very exciting sfuff, and for a list price of US$1298 seems like a great deal.