Is it time for Fractal to upgrade the DSP chips in the Axe FX II/Xl

Status
Not open for further replies.
when playing live with FRFR, at gig volumes / under gig conditions, is there really such a huge difference between normal-res, high-res and ultra-res cabs that you'd want to sacrifice CPU for it??

my take on this [if I were an FRFR user - which I'm not btw] would be to use normal-res live, and ultra-res when recording..
there are bigger tonal things to nail than the cab resolution..
like choosing the right cabs in the first place and nailing the EQ..
these two things have a far bigger impact on your resultant tone than cab resolution alone..
 
clarky said:
when playing live with FRFR, at gig volumes / under gig conditions, is there really such a huge difference between normal-res, high-res and ultra-res cabs that you'd want to sacrifice CPU for it??

my take on this [if I were an FRFR user - which I'm not btw] would be to use normal-res live, and ultra-res when recording..
there are bigger tonal things to nail than the cab resolution..
like choosing the right cabs in the first place and nailing the EQ..
these two things have a far bigger impact on your resultant tone than cab resolution alone..
Click to expand...

My tone doesn't always suck, but when it does, it's high-resolution!
 
I think the problem is everyone wants to use the hi res version of everything...high res reverb (sometimes two of them), two UR cabs for Stereo, high res mic pre in cab ect. Let's be honest here the non high res mic pre and verb are FAR FAR FAR from low quality. On top of all this two amps, two drives and every fx in the axe. It is getting crazy out here. Ppl are starting to get a 2nd axe or wanting and FX8 to use more fx ect. What is crazy is many of these guys are bedroom players (I am 75% joking about the bedroom player part)

we won't even get into the guys wanting to run two guitars, a bass and vocals all with their own routing at the same time through their ii. I am not knocking one here. It is amazing how much the ii can do but if you are pushing the axe to the max some times you will hit the ceiling.
 
brokenvail said:
I think the problem is everyone wants to use the hi res version of everything...high res reverb (sometimes two of them), two UR cabs for Stereo, high res mic pre in cab ect. Let's be honest here the non high res mic pre and verb are FAR FAR FAR from low quality. On top of all this two amps, two drives and every fx in the axe. It is getting crazy out here. Ppl are starting to get a 2nd axe or wanting and FX8 to use more fx ect. What is crazy is many of these guys are bedroom players (I am 75% joking about the bedroom player part)

we won't even get into the guys wanting to run two guitars, a bass and vocals all with their own routing at the same time through their ii. I am not knocking one here. It is amazing how much the ii can do but if you are pushing the axe to the max some times you will hit the ceiling.
Click to expand...

Yepp, spoiled child effect!
 
yek said:
The TigerSharc is already the most powerful processor out there. There are two of those inside the AxeFx.
Adding a 3rd would increase the price with hundrads of dollars.
Click to expand...

I'm ok with a price increase if it means more of what we all know and love, but wasn't there also some talk recently about how adding processors would also increase latency, possibly meaning *less* of what we all know and love?

Don't get me wrong, I see where OP is coming from, all the awesome improvements coming with the caveat that now we (that is, us regular folk, and not Simeon who comes up with effects madness) have to be more judicious. That said, I'll take where we're at now any day. Loopie really nailed it IMO.
 
Happens the same in mixing... newbies put 200 plugins per track...
The only presets with justified lots of blocks are the ones that absolutely need to be changed live without cuts, but in that case... buy another axe.
 
A friend of mine said : "the Axe FX II isn't powerfull enough, I'm running out of CPU".
I told him : "Buy another Axe FX II" and that's what he did.
Six months later, he sold one of them because one was enough for him in fact. Why ? Maybe because it wasn't easy enough to manage two units and he finally found solutions to get his own sounds in one preset in one unit.

I know I would be a bad salesperson for FAS.
 
more cpu power is always better. only cliff can tell how much of compromises he has to make while programming ;)

for myself i can count the times i ran out of cpu one the axe on one hand and i got one since the beginning :D (and i am using scenes, two ambs, two cabs on my live presets)

if you have ever used a pod HD the axe is so superior in terms of processing power its not even funny. i was testing some of these pods and after one amp one cab and i guess it was a compressor and one eq i couldnt add more .. in the axe that would be pretty much a simple basic setup to start with :D
 
Meh.... I don't get the venom for those openly commenting about next generation technology either. (well.. on second thought, maybe I do... I suspect it comes from a fear of their $2,500 rack unit going obsolete sooner than they would like. Ok. Yep. I get that. )

I don't think anyone has said the the XL isn't an amazing piece of gear. It certainly is. THE MOST amazing piece of kit...ever. Simply put. BUT... I'd bet my lunch that the reason it exists is because Cliff and company constantly pushed the envelope of "what can we do next?" "What can we do better?" They choose 2 Tigersharks instead of 1. They put in ideas that I haven't seen in other units. They gave room for way more external controllers than I've seen before. 2 of everything... 4 of some things... It's only natural that other people are playing the "what if" game.

Now some folks are asking... what can be done with 3 CPU's? or 4CPUs? Valid questions. Laptops and PC's did the same thing a while back. Quad cores became the norm. No need to bash that thinking. There will be a next generation of this product one day, and it will do more. I think we all know that. The latest firmware upgrades have introduced some CPU hungry features. Frankly, I can't make use of those things in a live setting very often now. No Hi Res reverb, stereo UR cabs or Mic-Pre's in my live patches. I just don't really have room for them. I don't miss them too much though, and they are great for recording.

I for one don't consider myself a "power user" (but I'm studying to try to get as close as I can to becoming one!) I run up against the CPU max pretty frequently these days. I play in a couple of cover bands and I cover a lot of ground. In some presets I combine my amp with another sound like a tone-match acoustic guitar, or a synth sound, or some other effect. This can eat up the resources fast. For some songs I have to use full presets instead of scenes, and that works fine. It's only a few songs. For most, I get creative with how I build scenes and presets to keep my CPU out of thermo-nuclear meltdown.

I just try to use this tool to the limit, and I think I do quite often. So... as it's limits expand... I guess mine will too.
 
Keep in mind, each effect block added to a preset adds to CPU usage, whether the block is active or not.

If you have unused blocks in your presets, consider replacing them with shunts.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
This same kind of discussion is and has been going on for some time on the UAD website. For those you who don't know about (UAD) . They are the Fractal Audio of the Pro Mixing and recording world. Their software
modeling of rare and vintage studio hardware are the Apex of Plugins. But, with this kind of detailed modeling, really eats into their 2, 4, and 8 DSP (Sharcs) cards. Yes, even having an Eight (8) core DSpc card is not enough
juice to run some of their plugins for a big mix.

In comparison, Avid, the company behind ProTools HD, make use of FGPA processors. These are 8-10 times more powerful ( in most cases) than even Tiger Sharcs..(I think) :)
 
It's difficult for me to imagine what the afx3 could offer that would make me buy it. My afx2 quite simply sounds like an amazing tube amp to me, with a bunch of top quality effects thrown in. There is nothing about it that is a bottle neck to my sound or creativity. Also I'm mostly not interested in new IRs, amp models or other ppls' presets that may stop being available once the afx2 is not the latest model.

Short of some super algorithm to extract guitar tracks from studio recordings and match it to my input signal to perfectly model the sound, I think I'll stick with the afx2 until it or me dies.
 
I like scenes with all the fx I normally use, in order to be flexible on-stage. My go-to presets look like something like this:
comp->wah->drive1->drive2->chorus->rotary->tremolo->multidelay->delay1->delay2->reverb.
With the new hi-res reverb I sometimes max-out the CPU. I don't think this is a crazy-big-preset. This is even less effects than I have on my stomp-fx-board. I have never understood why there isn't a X/Y/Off functionality on the Axe-Fx? That way you wouldn't need i.ex both Drive 1 and Drive 2. You could just ONE drive block with two different OD's on X and Y, and on "hold" (or a third click) you would turn the FX off. Now THAT would really save CPU. Anyone know why FAS doesn't support this?
So even though I love the machine I can't say that CPU isn't a issue for me. Not a huge one though, but if more FX's in the future are coming with "hi-res" quality I suspect I will have to rethink my presets.
 
jjdpro said:
In comparison, Avid, the company behind ProTools HD, make use of FGPA processors. These are 8-10 times more powerful ( in most cases) than even Tiger Sharcs..(I think) :)
Click to expand...

No. An FPGA can be used to do some bit-slice or word-slice DSP processing but pales to a dedicated DSP for the type of signal processing tasks we require. Typically you use an FPGA to off-load repetitive tasks from a host DSP or CPU. Where an FPGA shines is in massively parallel processing but they don't work as well as a dedicated DSP for sequential processing. This is why they are favored in things like SDR where you are doing a simple, fast operation on many simultaneous channels. Something like the Axe-Fx would perform worse using an FPGA solution, probably much worse.

If you have many tracks, as in a DAW, an FPGA can be a better solution due to the parallelism of the FPGA but the algorithms will be necessarily limited to simple things like EQ and compression. Complicated algorithms like reverb, distortion, etc. are better suited to a dedicated DSP. For example, the Xilinx "DSP Slice" is very crude in comparison to a dedicated DSP. It's limited to add, multiply and some logic operations. In contrast a dedicated DSP can do far more complicated processing.

I imagine the Avid cards are being utilized as dedicated coprocessors where some of the algorithm is native and certain operations are offloaded to the FPGA. Since this processing is necessarily parallel they can take advantage of the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom