Spectrum EQ window makes Reason slow & audio choppy

[mark999]

I've noticed that whenever I open the Spectrum EQ, it slows down my computer a LOT.
When I resize the Spectrum EQ window to a larger size, it slows down my computer even more, and if i resize the EQ window to make it larger, the audio becomes choppy and the DSP meter in Reason starts getting very high / maxing out.
Un-ticking the "Analyzer" in the spectrum EQ helps a little, but even with it switched off, when the spectrum EQ window is open, it slows things down a lot. The song plays perfectly fine as long as I don't open the Spectrum EQ window, and my computer is fast enough to make complex songs with lots of tracks, so the issue seems to be caused by the Spectrum EQ window being too CPU intensive.
I'm using the latest version of Reason (version 10.01)
My buffer size is set to 512 samples, I'm using a Macbook Pro (early 2015) 2.7Ghz Intel Core i5 with 8gb RAM.

Does anyone else have this issue?

[teddymcw]

Yaaa, it’ll do that.

Quoting Homer Simpson aside, yes the spectrum EQ uses a significant amount of cpu. What you’re experiencing is normal

[househoppin09]

Reading this, I was thinking "huh, I've never had a problem with the Spectrum EQ window being unreasonably resource hungry". So I went to play around with it, and... holy crap. I'm on Windows, so this is clearly OS-independent. I also tried it in both R7 and R10, and the behavior wasn't hugely different between the two (worse in R10, but only a little). I've got a reasonably powerful system, so for me the performance hit from just having the Spectrum EQ showing is fairly minimal, which must be why I never noticed this. However, resizing it (at large sizes) while the song is playing makes Reason's DSP usage go bananas. At larger sizes, dragging the window resizer around causes audio breakups like I've never heard before and soon pegs my CPU, even when the song file itself is pretty lightweight.

There's absolutely no way this is necessary or justifiable; Reason's overall CPU load is peaking at more than twice as much during resizing compared to what it is when the Spectrum EQ is at a fixed size. And of course, most of the CPU load at fixed size is audio-related, so if you separated out just the CPU usage for the Spectrum EQ itself, it looks like it must be using something like 10x as much during resizing as it uses at fixed size...?!

What's worse, there's a particularly nasty bug: if the "computer too slow" dialog comes up while I'm in the midst of resizing the Spectrum EQ window, the Spectrum EQ disappears and the mouse pointer gets "trapped" in the plane of focus for that no-longer-existent window, making it impossible to click anything anywhere. Even the "computer too slow" dialog itself is unclickable. The only remedy is to bring up the Windows Task Manager, thus forcibly shifting the mouse's focus. From there, the problem can be solved without terminating Reason by expanding Reason's list of sub-tasks and only terminating the one that corresponds to the "computer too slow" dialog. This behavior is exactly the same in R7 and R10. I don't have time to file an official bug report right now, but if someone else wants to do so, feel free to use my words or link to this post.

[mark999]

@househoppin09 thanks for the info, it's interesting to hear I'm not the only one.
I've now submitted a support ticket to Propellerhead about this issue so hopefully I will have more info soon.
Because I wasn't able to replicate your example, I didn't mention your experience in my support ticket, I think you should send them an email as well, I'm guessing if it's several people raising this issue hopefully it will get prioritised better.