Yup, for the first time ever, someone is sending me hardware for review. In fact, I probably need to make a new set of scoring procedures for reviews that include hardware. When You Don't The Pulsar review raises an interesting general question. For a long time I was strictly a native processing guy, Cubase and a G3. Now, I'm trying to find a balance between accelerated hardware DSP and native processing.
Audio processing is a particularly strange thing, because it's almost all real time.
It's nearly impossible to EQ the bass without having the kick drum going as well. That's a small example, but things get worse the more you start to mix. Not many CPUs can handle that quite yet. So, I think that today, in a world with budget limits, we should be using a combination of native processing and either outboard processors or PCI cards. What we native DSP users have discovered is that there are two things that just murder a CPU, a good reverb, and a good synth.