Quote:
Originally Posted by Knives&Guitars
Would you explain further what you mean by this. To the differences in home studio versus pro? Unfortunately I am not savvy with many of the terminology used and how each differs from each other.
Does DSP mean it is a hardware instead of a digitally processed plug in? And if so, I assume that hardware does not take up CPU space? |
Sorry,,,, so starting with the last first... Correct external hardware FX processors take up almost no CPU because the processing (analog or digital ) is done in the External unit itself, not the computer.
Ok so in the modern age of Digital music and using DAW's there are two basic types of processing
Native Processing (done on the host computer's CPU ) and DSP Processing done on additional DSP chips ..........
So in my post DSP means (Digital Signal Processor) They are Digital chips, that handle the processing on the chips themselves, and not on the computer CPU .... All the processing host computer CPU has to do, is launch the DAW application..
These chips can be on cards that can be inserted into computers ( now mostly tower style , also called desktop), that have accessible slots for the DSP cards, (usually on PCIe cards) Or they can be in an external unit (like a DSP capable interface) like UAD and Avid ..... Also they tend to be towards the more spendy side.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words
Below is a screen shot of my System Usage window for a Pro Tools session of mine (the Geronimo's Cadillac session)
.. I Have a Avid Carbon interface that has 8 DSP chips in it (bottom of System Usage window) with the 8 bars for the 8 chips
So the
blue arrows are my CPU iMac 8 core 16 threads
(BTW if you hear or read the term Hyper Threading) you can see that what little processing is taking place in the CPU is spread over multiple threads, as opposed to loading one ,then the next and the next etc. BUT note the Carbons DSP processing is doing one chip then the next ------ just a point of interest.
And the
red arrows are the 8 DSP chips in Carbon
So you can see,,,,, because when I took this screen shot I had almost all of the plugins on the DSP chips, and there is almost nothing on the computer CPU...... Most of the processing is on the DSP chips
