Building an expensive modeler is easy, they say

[DLC86]

Today I stumbled upon this cheap chinese modeler description and I laughed out loud

"We were impressed that a product like the Fractal® AX-FX had the foresight to use a high-definition TSAC (white-box) algorithm to do its Amp Modeling. So we took note and started development on an affordable modeler with TSAC-HD.

[...]

Building a sky-high priced product is easy. The art of building an affordable product is a real challenge. We priced the MG-300, with a straightforward high-performance algorithm to not only fit this specific DSP platform, but dominate the multi-efx platform in general."

https://www.nuxefx.com/mg-300.html

 

[Muad'zin]

The Chinese are very good at copying. And not because that is the only thing they can do, cause they are a very smart, resourceful and interesting people, but they would just rather copy someone else's hard work to rake in some cheap bucks then put in the hard work to develop their own. I reckon that Mao's Cultural Revolution f***ed them as a culture real good as it now seems to be a widespread behavior. And not just to us Johnny Foreigner, they themselves suffer as well. There's a reason why everyone in China, including CCP officials are using imported Covid vaccines and not their own. Or why ordinary Chinese go get their food at dinky wet markets instead of the supermarket. At least at the wet market they see their food being handled and prepared in front of their eyes.

 

[wagnar]

Mao's Cultural Revolution f***ed them as a culture real good as it now seems to be a widespread behavior.

Just a few minutes before I was talking the same thing with my buddy. China was a geographical name of a multi culture/language people. They were authentic producers and traders before in history but now they are just trying to copy things in existence. But again they fail on this job. Even the picks I have ordered from china 3 years ago are unplayable. Gosh.. I can not comprehend people paying money to those knock-offs.

 

[Klausi]

The MG-300 sounds really good and replaced my old terrible GT-100. I paid EUR 129 (~ $157) on Amazon. I use it on the sofa over my stereo system when I‘m to lazy to go to the studio. Tried this little toy because of Leon Todd‘s video:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?...51EEFC6CAD7139C4F8CE51EEF&FORM=VRRTAP&PC=APPL
Loaded Leon‘s 3 default IRs and I really like it. Best cheap solution I ever had. Nothing for gigs but maybe the new MG-30 which they just announced.

 

[Dr. Dipwad]

@wagnar:

Just a few minutes before I was talking the same thing with my buddy. China was a geographical name of a multi culture/language people.

Yeah, that's good to keep in mind. There's a difference between those stuck under the PRC boot, on the one hand, and the folks elsewhere. The cultural "Gramscian" damage done on the mainland is sad and undeniable; you saw the same kind of "hangover from communism" in most of eastern Europe during the immediate post-Soviet period.

I went to Romania during that time, and it was depressing: Nothing was made with any effort at quality. Hinges were attached crookedly, shelves sagging, stores with entirely empty display windows, rusting hulks of machinery out in fields: It was like the bad parts of Detroit had taken over a whole landscape. But five or six years later, here and there, you could see little bits of entrepreneurial spirit re-emerging. With it, came care for the quality of one's work. It was like seeing little flowers emerge through cracks in the pavement. I imagine it's even better now, though I've had no opportunity to return.

I expect that these stories follow a consistent pattern: If you put a few generations of otherwise-normal human beings under such conditions, they develop the same problems, and even if the oppressive regime is replaced, it takes a while for the poisonous mindset to clear out of the system. (But the folks in Taiwan, or Chinese expat groups in Malaysia and the U.S. and elsewhere, have a lot of brilliant and talented folks!)

 

[lauke-lux]

@wagnar:

Yeah, that's good to keep in mind. There's a difference between those stuck under the PRC boot, on the one hand, and the folks elsewhere. The cultural "Gramscian" damage done on the mainland is sad and undeniable; you saw the same kind of "hangover from communism" in most of eastern Europe during the immediate post-Soviet period.

I went to Romania during that time, and it was depressing: Nothing was made with any effort at quality. Hinges were attached crookedly, shelves sagging, stores with entirely empty display windows, rusting hulks of machinery out in fields: It was like the bad parts of Detroit had taken over a whole landscape. But five or six years later, here and there, you could see little bits of entrepreneurial spirit re-emerging. With it, came care for the quality of one's work. It was like seeing little flowers emerge through cracks in the pavement. I imagine it's even better now, though I've had no opportunity to return.

I expect that these stories follow a consistent pattern: If you put a few generations of otherwise-normal human beings under such conditions, they develop the same problems, and even if the oppressive regime is replaced, it takes a while for the poisonous mindset to clear out of the system. (But the folks in Taiwan, or Chinese expat groups in Malaysia and the U.S. and elsewhere, have a lot of brilliant and talented folks!)

Have effectively a long term reflection in China; their just moving back to the main trade position they occupied for thousands of years. Not my kind of society neither; but maybe remember the early years of mining and oil and gas in recent history; we went through a lot of accidents before safety and quality were identified as main issues.

 

[plexi59]

It’d sound much more convincing if their stuff could at least beat Axe FX 1. Which it can’t.

As far as copying, it’s nothing new. The Soviet Union copied entire microprocessors by reverse engineering them under a microscope. But you can’t build a leading product this way, and unless you actually design original stuff yourself, you’ll always be way behind, and you won’t know how to do anything original. Your product, in other words, will be cargo cult science, since the deeper understanding of “why” and “why not” cannot be obtained by reverse engineering the existing design.

 

[Muad'zin]

It’d sound much more convincing if their stuff could at least beat Axe FX 1. Which it can’t.

As far as copying, it’s nothing new. The Soviet Union copied entire microprocessors by reverse engineering them under a microscope. But you can’t build a leading product this way, and unless you actually design original stuff yourself, you’ll always be way behind, and you won’t know how to do anything original. Your product, in other words, will be cargo cult science, since the deeper understanding of “why” and “why not” cannot be obtained by reverse engineering the existing design.

But its not rocket science. As in the engineering principles and scientific ideas are out there. Even the USSR could sent its business attache's to a book store and get the scientific journals. Their engineers were very smart. They just did not have the advanced tech infrastructure that the West had that put them a few years behind what was technologically capable in the West. And even then they managed to keep with some brilliant ideas and shortcuts. Despite being a little cruder and less refined Soviet military designs were as good and sometimes even better then their Western counterparts. As witnessed when the West managed to get their hands on some of the latest Soviet designs after the fall of the USSR and were shocked at how good some of it was. They just kept it more simple.

The Chinese have been sending their people all across the world to study at our universities. They know our technologies and the scientific principles behind them. Some of their people have been working on them as part of their education. Like with the Soviets their tech infrastructure is still catching up, but they know how technology works. But as a culture they suffer way too much of why do it yourself when for less money you can copy. They make cheap ass crappy copies not because they can't do any better, but because they can't be bothered to put in the effort to create an excellent original product. When given the choice between striving for excellence and make a lot of money in the future or put in a little effort for a crap product now and make some money now, the choice will the latter. It's a cultural failure, brought about by the Cultural Revolution, which robbed them of their culture and left them with a pale shadow of what they used to have. Mao taught them to look out after themselves cause everything they had could be taken away from them at a moment's notice. And his successor Deng Xiao Ping taught them that getting rich was glorious. Creating a dangerous cocktail in their business practices.

 

[wagnar]

I have bought 2 pedals years before.
one was a bb preamp clone and the other was the moer preamp series (sharc chip)

Preamp was sounding like shit (literally). I gathered some material and with a few out of spec jfets and opamps I managed to make my own preamp with cloning from diy blog.

when I compared my diy jcm 800 fet preamp with theirs; the 20 years before american diy design was far too better and close to marshall.

And that day I promised myself to never even buy pick from there. After the promise I busted my cc with fx3 and a pair of hs8s. From here story goes happily ever after.


they can simply take the diy designs and modify/produce them but instead they follow the unethical and provocative road of copying an existing layout while it is patented and in business. Imho with this attitude they won’t be producing milestone designs like once Japanese brands did.

 

[plexi59]

But its not rocket science. As in the engineering principles and scientific ideas are out there. Even the USSR could sent its business attache's to a book store and get the scientific journals. Their engineers were very smart. They just did not have the advanced tech infrastructure that the West had that put them a few years behind what was technologically capable in the West. And even then they managed to keep with some brilliant ideas and shortcuts. Despite being a little cruder and less refined Soviet military designs were as good and sometimes even better then their Western counterparts. As witnessed when the West managed to get their hands on some of the latest Soviet designs after the fall of the USSR and were shocked at how good some of it was. They just kept it more simple.

The Chinese have been sending their people all across the world to study at our universities. They know our technologies and the scientific principles behind them. Some of their people have been working on them as part of their education. Like with the Soviets their tech infrastructure is still catching up, but they know how technology works. But as a culture they suffer way too much of why do it yourself when for less money you can copy. They make cheap ass crappy copies not because they can't do any better, but because they can't be bothered to put in the effort to create an excellent original product. When given the choice between striving for excellence and make a lot of money in the future or put in a little effort for a crap product now and make some money now, the choice will the latter. It's a cultural failure, brought about by the Cultural Revolution, which robbed them of their culture and left them with a pale shadow of what they used to have. Mao taught them to look out after themselves cause everything they had could be taken away from them at a moment's notice. And his successor Deng Xiao Ping taught them that getting rich was glorious. Creating a dangerous cocktail in their business practices.

I mean, as far as the level of complexity, I wouldn’t be surprised if AxeFX 3 approaches “rocket science”. Allow me to explain what I mean by that. If, today, the Chinese managed to obtain a complete set of blueprints for the Moon rockets and lander, they still wouldn’t be able to fly to the Moon, just like NASA can’t. It’d still take them many years, many billions of yuan, and a lot of trial and error to even begin to launch anything up there.

As someone who makes his living working on both the “science” and “engineering” sides of things, there’s a huge gap between theory and practice. Cliff could go to MIT and give lectures there for years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody manages to build an unit that could even begin to compete. Why? Because papers and lectures give you only the high level stuff. And even then, students will manage to capture a fraction of it, and they’ll forget much of what they’ve learned within 6 months of completing coursework. Practical, sellable products, on the other hand, are all about the details that are usually omitted in whiteboard presentations and papers. Same as those rocket engines that can no longer be built because folks who built them had retired years ago, and the details are no longer there.

Take lithography for example. All the literature is out there, and yet China itself can’t build its own advanced lithography.

There’s silver lining to this, though. Every now and then someone smart reinvents the bicycle and it turns out dramatically better than what we had before. This wouldn’t really happen if copying technologically difficult products was easy - the best you could hope for then would be incremental improvement.

It’s sort of like culture. If, e.g. you don’t have a culture of ballet, you can’t just start doing ballet - you have to build up the culture first, or else nobody even knows how to do it or what it’s supposed to be like. Or guitar music, to use a closer analogy. Complex, creative engineering is the same way. There’s a reason why nobody can replicate the iPhone, not even other US-based trillion-dollar behemoths, and why Amazon’s attempt at this was such an embarrassing failure.

 

[Renderman]

That would be a more convincing argument if it weren’t for the fact that China successfully landed on the moon in 2013.

 

[plexi59]

Soviets landed on the moon the same way China did, several times, starting in 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme. Their space program was one of the few things where they actually had the balls to innovate. Their space shuttle, Buran, for example, flew only once, but it was a fully autonomous flight, something the United States did not manage to pull off until X-37, 20 years later. And then Russia just pissed it all away, and they're still launching Soviet rockets because that's the only thing they know how to make. I'm sure they still have the blueprints to all the cool stuff though.

So even though the Chinese had all the public info (and stole what wasn't public), it still took them 43 years, billions of yuan, and several attempts to do what the USSR has done in 1970. As hard a feat as this is, putting people on there is so hard, not even the USSR was able to pull it off. And I'm pretty sure they knew pretty much everything there was to know at the high level, through spies and such, and had similar capabilities in most regards. What they did not have is what we don't have right now: the institutional knowledge. They "whys" and "why nots". The nitty-gritty. This is why we can't fly to the moon today - with all the people gone, we're only in a slightly better position than the USSR was back then. Perhaps even in a worse position, because back then it was fashionable to spend money on space programs, and now it's not.

There's a reason why the United States is the only country able to successfully put semi-autonomous landers on Mars. That reason is, someone kept the program alive instead of ticking a checkbox and letting the engineers go. Had they been let go, we'd lose this capability. Elon Musk wrote about this. In his view, technically complex capabilities aren't something you get to keep by default, and not something you can just start doing on a whim. You have to work hard and make stuff just to keep the institutional knowledge, and harder to push the state of the art forward.

There are dozens of such systems you interact with daily. Indeed, the very computer I type this on has no fewer than a dozen things in it that you wouldn't be able to make even if you had complete blueprints not just for the things themselves, but for the entire set of machinery required to make them, and for the machinery to make those machines, and so on.

The field I work in (deep learning / computer vision) is at times akin to black magic. You can give two people the same problem and one of them (that is, me ) will solve it much better than the other. It's not an exaggeration: that's literally how I feed my family right now. All the info is publicly available in papers on ArXiv. This is one of the most reproducible fields of computer science, by the way, even most of the code is publicly available under friendly licenses on GitHub, and you can reproduce the results on academic data, which you can also download.

But there are so many ways to skin the cat when it comes to practical problems that you benefit quite heavily from the right set of intuitions, something Cliff has an abundance of after 10+ years of working at the leading edge of his field (as well as from his previous jobs).

Now, it is possible that they'll just come up with another set of intuitions. But the process takes quite a long time, and you get a different result. This is not something you can really copy. The only real benefit you get when doing this today is you know for a fact that things you're trying to figure out at a deep level are in fact possible. This is not something the trailblazers have in their mind. There's more trial and error.

 

[lauke-lux]

Never ever underestimate a competitor in any domain that's my 2 cts. Culture comes and goes with time. Don't forget also that without the German rocket scientists that were moved to the US end of WW3 in 1945, maybe others would have been to the moon before...In a certain way everybody's kind of stealing or at least using knowledge of others to advance. There's no designed 'master' in the long run. But isn't that just the story of humanity ?

 

[plexi59]

That's for sure. But they aren't really a competitor in this case, just like a moped manufacturer is not a competitor for Ferrari. They can beat their chest all they want, if they had something that could sell for more money, they'd be selling it for more money. That's the fundamental truth of the situation.

 

[dpeterson]

That little thing has a great interface for a small screen. Didn't steal that Actually doesn't sound bad either. $149 is crazy, good little backup unit or for grab and go.

 

[unix-guy]

Soviets landed on the moon the same way China did, several times, starting in 1970: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme. Their space program was one of the few things where they actually had the balls to innovate. Their space shuttle, Buran, for example, flew only once, but it was a fully autonomous flight, something the United States did not manage to pull off until X-37, 20 years later. And then Russia just pissed it all away, and they're still launching Soviet rockets because that's the only thing they know how to make. I'm sure they still have the blueprints to all the cool stuff though.

So even though the Chinese had all the public info (and stole what wasn't public), it still took them 43 years, billions of yuan, and several attempts to do what the USSR has done in 1970. As hard a feat as this is, putting people on there is so hard, not even the USSR was able to pull it off. And I'm pretty sure they knew pretty much everything there was to know at the high level, through spies and such, and had similar capabilities in most regards. What they did not have is what we don't have right now: the institutional knowledge. They "whys" and "why nots". The nitty-gritty. This is why we can't fly to the moon today - with all the people gone, we're only in a slightly better position than the USSR was back then. Perhaps even in a worse position, because back then it was fashionable to spend money on space programs, and now it's not.

There's a reason why the United States is the only country able to successfully put semi-autonomous landers on Mars. That reason is, someone kept the program alive instead of ticking a checkbox and letting the engineers go. Had they been let go, we'd lose this capability. Elon Musk wrote about this. In his view, technically complex capabilities aren't something you get to keep by default, and not something you can just start doing on a whim. You have to work hard and make stuff just to keep the institutional knowledge, and harder to push the state of the art forward.

There are dozens of such systems you interact with daily. Indeed, the very computer I type this on has no fewer than a dozen things in it that you wouldn't be able to make even if you had complete blueprints not just for the things themselves, but for the entire set of machinery required to make them, and for the machinery to make those machines, and so on.

The field I work in (deep learning / computer vision) is at times akin to black magic. You can give two people the same problem and one of them (that is, me ) will solve it much better than the other. It's not an exaggeration: that's literally how I feed my family right now. All the info is publicly available in papers on ArXiv. This is one of the most reproducible fields of computer science, by the way, even most of the code is publicly available under friendly licenses on GitHub, and you can reproduce the results on academic data, which you can also download.

But there are so many ways to skin the cat when it comes to practical problems that you benefit quite heavily from the right set of intuitions, something Cliff has an abundance of after 10+ years of working at the leading edge of his field (as well as from his previous jobs).

Now, it is possible that they'll just come up with another set of intuitions. But the process takes quite a long time, and you get a different result. This is not something you can really copy. The only real benefit you get when doing this today is you know for a fact that things you're trying to figure out at a deep level are in fact possible. This is not something the trailblazers have in their mind. There's more trial and error.

tl;dr:

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you

I wish I knew that saying years ago when managers would ask me silly questions like "can you write documentation for X so someone else can support it"...

Where X was something like Apache, DNS, Samba, etc.

My answer was usually something like, "well I could, but there are already many books on the topic"

 

[plexi59]

tl;dr:

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you

I wish I knew that saying years ago when managers would ask me silly questions like "can you write documentation for X so someone else can support it"...

Where X was something like Apache, DNS, Samba, etc.

My answer was usually something like, "well I could, but there are already many books on the topic"

Exactly. Humans are fundamentally constrained in terms of I/O. The brain itself is much less constrained, but there’s only so much you can say, or write, or read, and complex concepts take time and effort to internalize, and it’s an imperfect process to say the least.

On the off chance that someone from NUX is reading this: become leaders in the niche Fractal refuses to touch - bedroom guitar practice in headphones. If you add a mode to your devices which makes them sound and feel the same in headphones as they sound and feel in the room, I’ll personally buy several.

 

[goodwill559]

speaking of plexi59's idea of bedroom practice, I'd like a solution that takes into account my head shape, where the guitar amp sits in space relative to me and adjusts the sound as i move and turn my head so it sounds more real when wearing headphones

 

[DLC86]

speaking of plexi59's idea of bedroom practice, I'd like a solution that takes into account my head shape, where the guitar amp sits in space relative to me and adjusts the sound as i move and turn my head so it sounds more real when wearing headphones

There are some vst plugins by Waves that do exactly that, using binaural and a head-tracker function

 

[plexi59]

There are some vst plugins by Waves that do exactly that, using binaural and a head-tracker function

That’s interesting. Has anyone tried this? Looks like they have a device to clip onto the headphones to track the position. This could actually work - there’s really nothing impossible about it.