RME HDSPe AIO Pro Sound Card…
Jul 18, 2022
Production and Creative
The HDSPe AIO Pro from RME Audio is the successor to the HDSPe AIO. The “Pro” adds an…
Top Drawer - Song of a Sinner
Kudos to the music supervision teams that worked on "Hunters" and "Barry" available on Prime Video and HBO respectivley. Both used this song in recent episodes. The final episode of season 1 on Hunters was especially haunting. Such a great gem from the 70s.
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- Category: Music Mix
Postmodern Jukebox 1950s cover of "STAY" by The Kid LAROI
Postmodern Jukebox is one of the greatest things on the Internet. We love all of their covers and they bring exceptional production value to these live performances. Thank you for bringing your creativity and joy to the world.
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- Category: Music Mix
The Los Angeles Rams Steal the Draft
Nice work Rams. A little fun after that Superbowl win. Well done and fun. Love the Celine Dion bit. actually laughed.
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- Category: Fun and Entertaining Videos
Walking in Staten featuring Marc Cohn, Pete Davidson, Big Wet and Method Man
Marc Cohn is awesome in this. "What do you mean I'm already in in?" Big Wet can certainly pull off more mainstream stuff too. This is one of the better pardody songs. Pete Davidson brings the funny with the nostalgia.
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Polyverse Comet Reverb Review
Comet is a beautiful sounding reverb with a powerful yet intuitive design. The GUI has an organic nature to it that responds with both sonic and visual feedback allowing you to dial in both lush spaces and straight ahead reverbs. The visual feedback is in the form of, you guessed it, a comet. It turns out to be a really great way to represent how the various settings impact the sound of the space. More discrete trails in the comet represent less diffusion. The comet gets bigger or smaller to represent size and the comet trails get longer or shorter depending on the decay settings. Dial up the detune settings and the comet trails are less directional. It's a really smart way to design a reverb GUI and provides instant visual feedback. It's certainly one of the most intuitive plug-ins we've used and very easy to dial in an effect.
Most importantly, Comet sounds really, really good. It's equally effective on separate instruments, vocals or an entire mix. In our video samples below you can hear it on a dry Moog lead sound, Korg Opsix and a full mix. It's easy to lose yourself in the sonic trails of Comet. And it's not just the wide open lushness. You can get the sound of tighter, smaller rooms with more discrete reflections or massive lush spaces with endless decay. With extreme settings you can create interesting effects that go beyond what a typical reverb plug-in can do and create syncopated effects.
Polyverse is aggressive on the pricing and you can grab Comet for $100 or so during special sales. We think it's a great tool to have in your sonic arsenal. At $149 Comet is very competitive with other reverbs on the market and the only one we've seen with such an inventive GUI. it's not your typical take on a hardware unit emulated in software. Like David S. Pumpkins, it's its own thing. We highly encourage you do download the demo and play with it. Check out our video and visit Polyverse for more on Comet and their entire lineup of plugins.
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Olivia Jean - Night Owl
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RME AO4S-AIO-192 AIO Expansion Board Review
The AO4S-192 AIO provides four servo-balanced outputs to RME PCIe audio cards like the HDSP 9632 and the AIO. It provides a seamless way to get more analog outputs, giving you six total when combined with the two existing outputs on the cards.
When we upgraded our audio workstation we no longer had PCI slots, only PCIe slots. So we swapped out a PCI based Lynx Two B (6 channels of analog) card for a PCIe based RME AIO (2 channels of analog) card. The performance of the AIO have been very good and we were waiting for the AIO Pro to upgrade. However, once we discovered the AIO Pro would not longer offer the ability to add more analog outputs with expansion cards we opted to upgrade the original AIO instead. We prefer internal cards and IO versus having external boxes.
The AO4S AIO comes with a cable to connect it to the main AIO card. Simply seat it in an empty case opening and secure it close to the main AIO card as the included cable is fairly short. So it's best if the two cards are adjacent to each other. The AO4S AIO does not use a PCIe slot. It occupies the space in the PC but the the extender on the bottom of the card has no electrical connection. It's simply for stabilization and is not connecting to the PCIe bus. All the connectivity happens through the cable.
Once installed the additional outputs show up in RME's Total Mix software. The next step is to turn the additional channels on in the Hammerfall DSP settings. This is a critical step because while the channels show in Total Mix nothing will happened until the additional outputs are configured in the Hammerfall DSP settings. This is not obvious if you haven't configure your AIO card in a while
We tested the the new outputs with the exact sames cables, settings, content, mixer and studio monitors. To our ears all the outputs sound exactly the same. So now, we have 6 pristine channels to work with and we can route audio in endless ways from our PC to our mixer and back out. This is very useful for mixing multiple tracks but also for podcasting and and being able to have multiple sources mixed into our feed.
You can find the RME-AO4S-192-AIO selling for $350 new and for $200 or so used. Online retailers no longer stock the device and it drop ships from RME directly. You also may receive a unit with different colored capacitors. The boards with the blue and red capacitors appear to be the latest version.
Learn more about RME-Audio and it's lineup here.
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Derek Minor (ft. Hollyn) - Change the World
We could use more of this in the world, especially now. We once watched a group of 300 students sing this while they jumped up and down and it was inspiring.
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Korg opsix FM Synth Review
The opsix is a powerful little FM based synth from Korg that sounds really good. Korg has made FM programming accessible with the opsix. They've included many of the iconic key and bell sounds you'll recognize from the DX-7 days but that's just a fraction of what the opsix is capable of. The presets are so good. Come for the built-in sounds, stay for the addition to discovery.
After downloading the 2.0 update we were impressed by many of the new presets that are complex patches that sound really good. With or without the built-in effects of the opsix the instruments you can create are very musical.
We love the way the opsix pairs with something like a subsequent 37. It's just the right combination of analog and FM we like. We found ourselves firing up the opsix more and more to simply explore the sounds and tweak the faders and knobs to see what we could come up with. We don't remember FM being this fun with the DX-7.
The opsix is cheaply made and does not inspire confidence upon unboxing. It's a lot of plastic with a really cheap keybed and, well, it's a lot of cheap plastic. We feel we could accidentally damage any of the various in/out jacks on the back of opsix easily. The main controls, knobs and faders are fine and we also love the way the opsix looks. It photographs really well. But it's really cheaply made. The BOM or bill of materials must be really low on this sucker. So kudos to Korg for making what we imagine is a fairly profitable unit at scale.
So yeah, it's cheaply made and we would have liked a much better keybed. However, what counts is the sound and the opsix sounds great. It really does. The built-in effects are really good and it pairs nicely with outboard gear too. At times, we simply forgot we were playing an FM based synth. It's that good. It's not just bells and biting sounds. The opsix can do warm pads, poly sizzle, and interesting atmospheric sounds as well. It's an extremely versatile synth and would be a great first synth to learn what FM can do.
Would be nice to see Korg release a sound module version of the opsix unless they plan on doing a better versions with a proper keybed with a much better feel and aftertouch...etc. For users where this is not their primary keyboard this isn't an issue. However, it wouldn't take much much to improve the keybed for the opsix plus.
Visit Korg for more information about the opsix and all the specs.
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