An heretical thought.

[905shmick]

You'd need at least 2 mixers for 24 physical outs. Each mixer can only handle 16 (8 pairs of stereo) outs.

[Iain Westland]

thought so, just checking my IQ (Idiot quota) for today

[Bob L]

Well... you can also get 6 stereo pairs out of the aux send masters, so actually, that's a total of 28 physical outs per console.

But... its easier to split to 2 mixers and do direct assignments of 12 and 12 for your 24 outs to an external deck.

Of course, its all much easier to just use SAWStudio in the background for a live 48 chan recording direct from SAC itself.

And... a soon to come SS update will allow 64 direct chans of record from SAC.

Bob L

[RBIngraham]

As my proof-of-concept system I'm running an old shuttle 1.8 ghz Pentium-D system, and a MOTU 2408 MkII and three ADA8000s. With it, I can do 24 channels, all with EQ, compression and Aux for reverb, 6 monitor boards, each sending an mono out, and a 7th monitor board doing 24 channels of direct out for recording to an external 24-track. When i do that, I get around 40-48% CPU usage, and start to hit trouble if I push it too much farther with plugins. I've found I don't really want to push it past 50%

So yes, I'm running out of CPU. On the other hand, all I have to do is buy a newer computer/processor and I'll be fine... probably even fine to add another 2408 and three more ADA8000s.

so yeah ... Moore's Law probably wins on this one.

OK, sure, but that' s a hell of a lot of processing for what is essentially a 2 or even 3 generations old CPU architecture now.

I have my SAC rig running on a 3GHz PIV 533MHz FSB with 1.5 GB of RAM and I have 32 Inputs, with 3 Main Outputs, and 4 Monitor Mixes, with a good amount of EQ, a few dynamics and several plug-ins for verbs. And I'm running around 35 to 40 % on the SAC meter.

So I suspect that a Core 2 Duo could easily do twice as much as that, especially one that has a 1.13 GHz FSB. Since SAC doesn't make all that much use of multiple Cores (from what I've read here) seem like the speed of the FSB on the Motherboard architecture would play a good amount in how much you'll get out of SAC.

I guess my point is I just don't see the need to implement some scheme that uses the GPU for extra gas in processing. If you SAC rig is straining under a heavy load, I think it would be much more advantages for Bob to spend his time making more use out of multiple core CPUs first, rather than playing around with the GPU. So that way you could step up to a Quad Core (or more in the future, who knows) and actually see some real improvement. Or making use of a 64 bit OS would also make a huge improvement with little change in hardware, assuming that your hardware is all 64 bit OS compatible.

[ssrsound]

OK, sure, but that' s a hell of a lot of processing for what is essentially a 2 or even 3 generations old CPU architecture now.

My point exactly.

Oh -- and I stand corrected on the direct-outs. i was only doing 18 channels of it. 1-16 from the masters, and 2 channels from an Aux. I'd love to just do it with SAW, but the price is much higher than the $0 of using my existing HD24. One day when i start making money with this rig it'll be part of the setup.