Fuel

iLOK is - like it or not - industry standard for DAW and DAW plug ins Us moaning on this board isn't going to change that What it may change is whether Sonic Studio uses iLOK for Amarra. My sense from reading this board is that Sonic would have been prudent to perform more beta testing before releasing the product. It doesn't seem to be well tested, has many bugs and some unusual functionality choices (e.g. only one parametric eq). One of these pieces of market research should have been about product protection.

iLOK is an industry standard for the professional side of our business Just get over it

Yeah its GUI scripting I'm on a G4/10.4.11 setup and no plans to upgrade to Snow Leopard as it would require a new computer

I've written an applescript to do this, unfortunately it seems only to work on my computer which is running 10.4.11 Chris tried to get it working with 10.5 but he couldn't Am willing to share it if anyone is interested

Yeah, you're probably right, just in my experience of dealing with room modes and reverberation is that they can hide a multitude of equipment sins - in other words as you start to get the room sorted, any problems with your equipment become more obvious.

Careful, what you might be hearing is a reflection or excess reverberation that was previously masked by the room mode you just took out....

That looks like a cool app, combining the power of Jack with an AU host. Will have to play with it. Looks like they have some scriptable bits in it, which could eliminate the pita UI scripting I had to do with Jack and AU Lab..

Of course, I'm not planning to go into business just yet, and as I said earlier I think the deal with the 'spatial computer' is the 'package' they are offering, not just the collection of off the shelf components. I was using a Mac Mini (1st gen) 512mb ram with an offboard firewire hard disk, all music ripped to apple lossless. DAC is Weiss DAC2. Using free apple utility AU Lab which is distributed as part of their x-code tools to host the IK multimedia application ARC. Using Jack to connect iTunes to AU Lab to DAC. Recently though I have been playing with hand tuned parametric EQ using Waves plugin as opposed to automated EQ like ARC offers. The problems are with getting it all to load up when you boot up the mac as you have to open the apps in a certain sequence (Jack then iTunes & AU Lab then Jack routing file & AU Lab config). Of course you can do it manually but then its not really headless. I managed to create a script to load everything in the right order. AFAIK ARC doesn't run at 192 khz. The other thing you will notice is that the spatial computer dacs all contain mic preamps and A/D stages which are required for the ARC software. The 1 box approach spatial is providing fits with the type of customer they are targeting, which isn't most of us forum dwelling computer audiophile DIY types. Its the turnkey music server segment.

I think its more about the service side than the actual collection of products. I'm guessing the appeal is to the people who don't know / don't have time to get such a system set up to be user friendly and reliable. It took me a while to work out how to script the o/s so that on boot up the mac loads the various pieces of software required and the appropriate configuration files. And even then there were some teething problems with dropouts that required some buffer fine tuning.

Looks like they might be using the ARC plugin from IK Multimedia for the room correction side. My guess is they are running it inside a VST or AU host using something like Jack or some custom written software to perform the audio routing I use a similar setup on my MAC Top marks on the company idea - using off the shelf products to create a unique service and selling it at a premium.

Audiozorro Obviously if you just play with the settings without a measurement capability then you are not going to get a good result. I can't understand why they wouldn't include more parametric filters (at least 3) to deal with the main length, width and height modes in a room

If the tube amp can drive the electrostatic without altering freq response and can supply sufficient current without increased distortion then its a good performing component SETs typically wouldn't fit into this category, although there are always exceptions

I can't understand why Amarra has only 3 eqs and why they have chosen a low and high shelf over including three parametric bands which would seem more useful for dealing with things like room modes.

1) You can have enjoyable with poor relationship to the original recorded sound 2) If you have a poor amp whatever you will hear less variation between a Cambridge Audio DAC and a DCS compared to having a good amp 3) Because most people wouldn't know one end of a spectral decay or ETA from the other. 4) I have found higher performing components often reveal problems with lesser performing components e.g. you wouldn't pair a great pair of loudspeakers with a low end dac. Because lower performing components aren't as revealing you can get away with the deficiencies in other components. Hence why high distortion tube amps go with response-all-over-the-place single driver speakers.

NOS + single driver speaker + valve amp Enjoyable maybe Accurate no IMO the problem with highly resolving components with low distortion, low noise floors, etc is they demand more of a system approach. And because most people have crappy, uncalibrated listening rooms, that means that lower resolving components often end up sounding the same or better. Bring the flames