Well, just to add in here... I don't find the 64 streams limiting for my own use... others might perhaps... but I've never had a problem with this.
The Ss mixer is, as far as I know, the closest you're going to come to having an 'actual' hardware mixer in a DAW environment... without actually having to have one. And in many important ways it has quite a few advantages over a hardware mixer... the versatility to set up your own mixer design to suit your needs (from a blank starting point) being probably the foremaost advantage. From there the routing possibilities are almost endless. I've never run across a routing stiuation that I couldn't handle with the Ss mixer... in a lot of years of work and in many different working situations. This is not to be taken lightly. It is simply very, very versatile and very, very powerful.
And I agree with Gerhard, the iBox convertors sound great... even the older 20 bit ones still hold their own! No matter how you look at it, there's tremendous value in the Soundscape products compared to anything remotely in this echelon of DAW equipment.
Jake, you called it a \"liberation\". I'll second that! I've found it liberating to the extreme over the years with the Mixtreme cards and now the Mixpander. Soundscape/Sydec were literally years ahead of everyone else in my opinion with their design goals and their products... and that maturity shows in their current lineup. While these may appear to be \"new\" products to some people... Soundscape/Sydec has actually been doing these things right for quite a long time now.
Tom... first of all Yes.. I'm very, very happy with my Ss rig... absolutely no questions of that whatever! And for waht it's worth... this is how I make my living. I need and want professional, well designed, flexible, and very, very dependable products... and with no monkey business when it comes to support. I get all that with the Soundscape products... in spades!
Now, about the X2 issue. I don't mean to lead you astray here... it's primarily the A8V that seems to be a problem with Mixpander... not X2 in general. And in all fairness... there seems to be restrictions/problems between many of the various DSP cards and mobos. As you may already know, it's not a universal situation where anything works with anything... far from it.
I plan to try an X2 cpu in my Gigabyte K8NS Ultra-939 sometime soon and see if \"everything\" will work there. Others have reported this is working well with Mixpander/Mixtreme. The issues as well are with UAD-1/Powercore. It's pretty easy really to build (or buy) a rig that suports these things... just maybe supporting them *ALL* at once that gets a little complicated. :wink:
And yes, you can set up multiple headphone mixes ..with reverb. And it will all work as expected like a hardware mixer. You can do literally anything you can think up so long as you can plot it out in the mixer. The software is capable. I've amazed myself at times by \"suddenly\" realizing some new routing situation that I hadn't thought of before... even after years of using the Ss mixers.
Compressors (and anything else) can be set up pre or post (so that you can record through them or simply monitor the results) by simply moving the plugin in the mixer to a pre or post \"visual\" position in relation to the \"trk\" inserts. Much harder to explain than to do. It's really all very, very simple and intuitive in actual use. And once you set up mixers how you like them you can save them as presets. This kind of versatilty is pretty much \"total\".
There isn't anything else on the market even remotely like this.... at anywhere near this price point (or arguably at all) that I'm aware of.
There was a great review in the April 2005 issue of \"Sound On Sound\"... Very comprehensive and well worth ordering the back issue or reading online... highly recommended. If my excitement isn't convincing enough... read what this guy has to say!!! :lol: The reviewer was obviously very blown away with the Mixpander.
Cheers,
Commodor