exo-metal":317x50sh said:
Strymon has done well selling individual units but I'm holding my breath for them to release a multi fx rack unit.
That would be an interesting product!
Done right, running at true line levels, full stereo and hopefully balanced I/Os too.... for those who understand that time based effects should run after a preamp (thus line levels) and enjoy stereo.
Unfortunately market has gone thru a huge cultural and technical regression... just look at what people use and how badly... and there you get the reality, the picture.
We're back at the end of the '70s with the big difference that then all standards and awareness had still to be created... now we have them... and people have no idea about them.
If you consider the current situation from a pure biz point of view, the making of single pedals, running single fx algorithms (in this day and age it's ridiculous...) makes for a VERY lucrative gain for companies.
Consider the following:
a Strymon pedal runs on a 300+ MHz Sharc DSP chip... very powerful. That kind of power is what you would get from a rig running an Eventide H8000 and H7600 together.
How about 3 PCMs 81 or 5 Eclipses? Yep... that's the kind of power you are looking at, when buying a SINGLE strymon large pedal.
Now... they run at 96KHz which is an illogical choice for a guitar, especially running at such low voltages as a -10dBV instrument level connection is... possibly THE worst way to run audio at all.
There's no need for 96KHz sampling rates there as it's a waste of power... that choice makes the processor use twice the resources it would use at 48KHz and for NO reason at all.
Of course... these strymons run everything off the DSP, meaning that there are no co-processors running the operative system and the MIDI, U.I.... but still, at 300+MHz and 48 KHz sampling... one of those chips could make for a very powerful multi-fx processor IF a whole product would be well designed around it. And a great analog input section for TONE is mandatory as all pedals have really bad tones because of that missing.
The kind of money they are making on a single pedal/single algorithm is huge as they force you to buy 3 or 4 pedals to have everything you need. If they did a rack multifx they'd not use 4 Sharcs in it as they could easily run things on a couple of dual core chips... and save on costs. But still it'd have to be more expensive than 3 or 4 of their pedals... in a market that doesn't buy much of these rack things... UNLESS you get into high end gear, like a Bricasti M7 reverb, running 6 2 dual core Sharcs (that's 12 cores, kids!)... but for a quality reason and 192KHz sampling rate if desired.
So... as much as I share your hope and the vision of amazing ways a more advanced rack unit could bring to spectacular development of new algorithms... I don't see this coming. They are very very well off and rich building these little things most people run in mono. Hell.... think about it... most of the customers don't even have an hifi system at home and all they knew about it are shitty MP3s.... they have no idea what voltage is and does to sound and tone. Eventually they might do something a bit bolder than the pedals, only because there seems to be a synth market asking for it, possibly in the Euro 500 box format (what a pain are those!)... but as for a 19" rack... I think we are far away from it. I may be proven wrong? Yes. Let me know when and IF this happens...