Ateis

[dbuckley]

Web site at http://www.ateis-international.com

 

They do what for all the world looks like a err... clo cop something similar to a SoundWeb , the Universal Audio Processor UAP 88...?

[mac.calder]

SoundWeb is a Digital Signal Processing unit (a better known brand of DSP that they want you to think is unique, sure, but DSP none the less) - quite a few other DSP units are out there on the market. The UAP 88 does not seem to have the sophistication of a SoundWeb unit which can do some really cool/complex signal path things. It appears to be just a matrix mixer controlable through RS-232 with some basic effects added in.

[dbuckley]

It appears to be just a matrix mixer controlable through RS-232 with some basic effects added in.

 

You've not read the documentation, have you :)

 

Its like a soundweb (or the Rane DragNet products) in that it has a "drag 'n drop 'n wire 'em up" user interface in which you arbitrarily link together blocks to make the thingie you want. and then download the generated DSP program to the box. Its not like the dbx ZonePro or Symetyrix ZoneMix or most of those other DSP boxes which are, as you say, fixed function, and if they dont support the configuration you want you're stuffed.

 

Building blocks include EQs, parametrics, crossovers, feedback killers, mixers and routers, crossovers, delays, comp/lims, automatic mic mixing, and probably more. I doubt you can have too many 'hard' blocks before the DSP runs out of steam; theres a screenshot in the manual that shows 4 x 2 band EQ, 4 x hi/lo pass, 4 x comp/lims, 2 x agc and 2 x mixers and another screenshot that shows 32 wires (which matches the list above) and CPU at 99.5%, so that looks to me like a full load, but even so, it looks a reasonable amount of audio magic for the price...

 

If I 'just' wanted a matrix, zoned or paging mixer there are many other choices. Hell, I've got an old Cloud in the garage that does zoned audio for the house :)

 

Edited to say: that 99.5% number sounds like one is far too close to 100%, but with DSPs things are very different to yer average PC or Mac. In a DSP, one writes a program that consists of a series of instructions. The big difference is the first couple of instructions of the program wait in a tight loop until a clock timer state changes, and then the DSP shuttles through the code, the last instruction of which jumps back to the wait loop. DSP designs normally have more CPU speed than memory to hold the program, so even if the program memory is full, the CPU still spends a lot of time idle in the start loop. So 99.5% means you've got very few slots for instructions left, but you are in no way near the limit of the computational ability. The clock rate comes, of course, from the A/D conversion, so the DSP cycle starts every 44.1KHz or 96KHz or whatever.