Open SCOPE DSP platform released!

Will the new Scope platform work with the older Creamware cards?

Yes it will, do keep in mind that the oldest Scope cards are getting over 15 years old and may need contact cleaners on their PCI connectors not to mention finding a PC with PCI slots and other preventive maintainance these day’s but the company actually still makes and uses the 3 chip card in their Radio editing products so excluding the older versions would be shooting themselves in the foot

AMD still make chipsets that support PCI, so it’s not going away too quickly and I am firmly in the AMD camp for various reasons, none the least of which is good video support.

I managed to get an A10-5800K on an ASROCK motherboard using the default GPU, which has 3x PCI slots and I’m not concerned about the future as I am willing to go with the VST System Link and purchase more Cubase packages as needed since I have a Powercore as well.

From the Sonic Core FAQ, it seems that plugins developed in Open Scope can be ported to the 5.1 platform, so a long period of compatibility appears certain.

I know, may main board ia an ASROCK system with 3 PCI slots and I actually found out that ASROCK still makes an upgrade board with 5 PCI slots, it only supports quad cores and will not work gracefully with win 7 or 8, but I bought 2 , 2 second hand copies of XP and now buy any Yamaha, roland, Korg, Terratec, ESI and creamware card I can find cheaply on ebay… Annoyingly enough since they are fabricated using an older process the old ADK 20 and 24 bit ADC converters on some of these boards actually sound better than my brand new 32 bit CMOS converters So I actually find myself using the older boards more and more

Thank god for the steinberg dongle, I would shoot myself if I had to shuffle software licenses amongst all my computers

Most of my work is done on a UA-1G connected to a TC Electronic BMC-2, the latter of which gives me optimum DA conversion. This is in turn connected to Avantone Active Mixcubes, so I don’t really have to worry about converters if working only in stereo, which is why I dig this new Cubase so much since the routing facilities are more than enough for my mostly MIDI needs.

And yeah I’m all for the dongle, they literally mean value for money in the long run for all. :nerd:

I do own scope home project with the luna2496 io box.

This platform is to expensive, they should look over at apple which is intial a big spend but buying apps and OS costs a fraction compared to the windows platform.

If they were able to lower the prices so they would get quantity they would manage to keep their heads above the water.

They are primarily a company making radio broadcast software and hardware not a provider of semi-pro equipment so perhaps just do not want to go into the consumer market, as for them making a cheaper version, one is apparently on the way but how cheap remains to be seen. But is should be noted that Sonic-core has been financially stable for close to a decade while Creamware which did make cheap scope hardware went bust twice and the company that bought the technology with SC and sold the plugiator, a cheap DSP box based on the same technology went bust as well

As most people do not seem to understand the difference between how a DSP works and how it is different to how a host processor works it may simply be that it is conceptually impossible to market an open system to consumers and semi-pros, the only other company that has seen some success using similar technology is UAD who have a closed system that they sell as a kind of a magic box that runs expensive plugins (use the same AD DSP family as Scope BTW)

UAD do make good performing plugins, even their last generation cards still work very well in terms of the software they run.

When I first considered S|C I thought I could not use UAD/Powercore inside cubase and Scope “outside” as it were but I believe I can for mixing.

As to scope 6, of course it would be great inside Cubase as a complete environment but if successful you can bet Yamaha/Roland will do something similar but of course SB will naturally work with them all (at least on it’s commercial side, it won’t bar other systems unless it is barred itself).

They are primarily a company making radio broadcast software and hardware not a provider of semi-pro equipment so perhaps just do not want to go into the consumer market, as for them making a cheaper version, one is apparently on the way but how cheap remains to be seen. But is should be noted that Sonic-core has been financially stable for close to a decade while Creamware which did make cheap scope hardware went bust twice and the company that bought the technology with SC and sold the plugiator, a cheap DSP box based on the same technology went bust as well

As most people do not seem to understand the difference between how a DSP works and how it is different to how a host processor works it may simply be that it is conceptually impossible to market an open system to consumers and semi-pros, the only other company that has seen some success using similar technology is UAD who have a closed system that they sell as a kind of a magic box that runs expensive plugins (use the same AD DSP family as Scope BTW

Well maybe that’s the new direction SonciCore is taking but I’m talking indeed of the time they were Creamware (in fact they still are because the people who started the company again are old creamware members).
As far as I can oversee this platform had it’s strong side but for me an a lot of other musicians using the scope platform it was way to expensive, mainly because you had to buy the additional dsp expansions so you could indeed run multiple plugs or synths, the home scope project with 3 dsps (which I own) was only able to run 1 reverb or a few compressors.

I needed to but a scopebooster with 15 dsp which was about 1500 euros.
As a digital mixer this platform was unbeatable just ike the Yamaha dsp platform, no latency!

Anyway I prefer native these days.

No this is a common misunderstanding, the Sonic Core people are not the Creamware guys, they are people that developed some of the Creamware technology and in the end bought it from the bankruptcy court, not on their own, USE Audio and the now defunct WERSI also bought the rights to use Creamware tech (the latter possibly in a different time-frame), the people behind Creamware are actually the guys later founded USE Audio in India (use-audio.com - use audio Resources and Information.) and made the Plugiator

As for reverbs, since most reverb algo’s are is just bit-shifting and not hard signal processing normal processors/native CPU’s do it better except in cases like where you use simulation models rather than IR’s and time slicing like most reverbs do (and Quantum is the only maker I can think of that actually uses sims), I never understood why people thought the Scope platform was a good idea for generic reverbs and delays since the memory on the early system was limited and the constant ping ponging of bits from card to host made it hard on the PCI bus leading to hiccups and so on. Reverbs were in fact just about the worst use for these cards imaginable.

The New Scope system is a different issue since the increased memory etc. makes reverbs and delays make sense since you can keep all audio data inside the system as a sort of a studio-inna-bun simply because the DSP power of the Xite is exponentially higher than that of the old cards and you are not sending data to and fro the host system because the DSP’s lack memory as in the old system.

Creamware went bust in 2002/3 at the time the 3 DSP cards were considered bargains by any measure, DSP cards at a price similar to a similarly specced I/O only card, while the 3 chip cards are archaic by now and expensive for what they are it should be noted that unlike Creamware, Sonic Core bundles a whole host of plugins which is were the real value lies. I bought into the system in 2009 to get Modular III simply because the native modular synth plugins on the market were more expensive and nowhere as functional as MIII, that I got a whole host of mixers, signal processors and synths with it as well made me consider it to be a bargain as software or as a system, building up a similar array of native plugins would have cost me a lot more, the value of the hardware on its own is debatable however.

Remember that you can slave cards together with a cable, if you have the PCI slots, plugin-less 3 DSP cards go on ebay for 10 to 40 Euros the mid sized ones go for 30 to 60, the cable you can make yourself for under 5 or buy made for 14 so expanding is easy if you really want it.

Yes, unless you use the VST mode (which is problematic anyway) the Scope acts as an fully independent system so you can use the other DSP cards for effects and synths inside Cubase and then use the Scope as well, not just for mixing

I don’t really record, so this sounds like what I need.

Occasionally I play MIDI instruments into Cubase but I figure the latency can’t be any worse whether a synth is before or after Cubase.

I am actually very interested in the drum machines of Scope, since I’ve found nothing native nor DSP that I like or can obtain, let alone be able to use them with a e-kit.