antic604 wrote: ↑14 Mar 2018
What's the DSP hit of Spectra in a range between Subtractor and Expanse?
I've noticed you've asked this a few times so I'll have a go at answering. Note I'm the developer but I'm not into marketing so I'm going to give it to you as straight as I can, but ymmv.
The simple answer is yes. It is somewhere between those and in some situations may rival the performance of Expanse. In my experience and with my negligible sound programming skills I often create patches which perform pretty closely in line with the really cool synth "Quad".
The complicated answer is this. Performance depends on the number of features you use, how you use them and the number of notes or voices in the part being played. There are a few things which ramp up the cpu in Spectra (as they would in any synth). They are
1. Unison. 1,2 and 4 voices of unison have no additional CPU hit but I really wanted to be able to have 8 (per generator). Using 6 and/or 8 will increase the CPU.
2. Long Release times. One of the sound designers requested 26 second release times! ( the dsp developers nightmare). Using long release times (on top of the features listed hear will certainly drive up the cpu). Note: I implemented it this way because rather than reducing the synth and avoiding the issue, I made a conscious choice to let the user decide. This is why the answer can be complicated.
3. Using the Harmonic Envelopes - Each of these envelopes has 256 DADSR envelopes within it. That can be a cpu hit. But I really wanted this feature in. (I may have been the only one).
Note the HEnvs are optimised so that they don't draw CPU if they aren't used.
4. The Noise Generator. This is an expensive luxury. it is effectively a third Voice and using it on top of the other stuff listed above can steal more CPU.
Many of the demo song developers had to bounce tracks after 5 or 6 instances (possibly less, I didn't personally view every song).
After saying all of that.
I believe the best advice is to trial it and assess it for yourself. The performance is what it is. By this I mean that there are only a limited number of opportunities for optimisation left and these would require updates to the SDK. What I am saying is you should base your assessment of the performance on the way it performs for you now. Please don't purchase it in the hope that it will be optimised more in future. It might but this depends on things outside of my control (i.e. an update to the SDK). I'm happy for any of the demo song developers, sound designers or beta testers to challenge or add to this.