A New Dynamic Combination for Plasa 2010…

The desirability of a product is inversely proportional to its availability.  As often happens, once something goes out of production, people are desperate to get hold of one.  More often than not, this is just to put on a shelf and admire as a great example of its genre, or maybe as the first ever version of something.  They’ll never use it again properly, except to occasionally show it to a fellow admirer.

I am guilty of this type of behaviour, especially with technology.  Not so much of the clamouring for something because it has become rare, more because it holds a certain nostalgia, or is a piece of great design and worked really well.  Without going too much further into this I would just mention the XO Laptop – designed as the ”$100 laptop”, whilst it has yet to achieve this price, it’s good to know that to date nearly a million and a half of these little machines have been given away to developing nations’ kids to help them educate themselves.

I bought one of these as part of the ”Give One Get One” program a couple of years ago (thanks again to Kevin Markowitz at Group One for helping with this – cheers mate!) and it’s a masterpiece of practical design that has been so carefully thought out as to extend to things like spare screws inside the case so kids can fix it themselves if anything ever needs replacing.   This would be my example of good design that also does its job extremely well.  It was criticised in some quarters as not actually being a very good computer, but that wasn’t its design remit – it was supposed to be a leaning tool for collaboration in classrooms in developing countries and so not only was the software important, the hardware and of course cost were crucial if it was to be a success.  But enough of that – read more about it here if you are interested:  https://laptop.org/en/

My geeky, retro nostalgic example would have to be my Vectrex.  I am not a gamer by any standard or definition, but this console still can entertain me for hours with its incredibly  smooth and fast vector graphics and crap sound chip blurting and squirting effects though its (really very loud) little speaker.  I can’t remember exactly when this was released (early 80s?), and I’d be lying if I said it was a beautiful piece of design, but it does work very well, and I love mine dearly.  Sad. Sad. SAD.  More on the Vectrex here :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex

So maybe now I should get to the point.  First we had SiDD – xta’s first foray into digital dynamics came about as an extension to the work we had done in perfecting the limiters that went into the DP224 and DP226.  One of reasons for the success of these units was not just how good they sounded under normal circumstances, but how good they sounded when they were being really THRAPED (for non UK residents, that means driven hard :)).  This was all down to the limiter algorithms being so transparent.  Other companies limiters had a far from linear response, despite the assumption that a digital limiter would be a perfect model, and this non-linearity manifests itself as distortion, not all that measurable on a steady state signal in a test environment, but definitely audible with music.  As we don’t tend to go to a concert to listen to sine waves (unless it’s Pendulum, but why bother?!), the musicality of the limiters set the units apart, and continue to do so to this day.

So SiDD – the ”Seriously Intelligent Digital Dynamics” unit was born.  Two channels of Dyamic EQ (only one band though), a compressor with sidechain EQ, a noise gate or expander with sidechain EQ, and a limiter with look ahead delay and again, sidechain EQ.  Harmonics generation, a delay line and a pile of parametric EQ made this a formidable box of tricks, forming a pretty comprehensive engineer’s toolbox, capable of sorting out all manner of problems and also being used creatively in a studio environment.

The only real criticism SiDD faced was that with all that power, it was hard to access everything, even though menus were kept to a minimum and there was a powerful Windows package to run with it.  So along came the Series 2 processors:  the best bits of SiDD but with knobs on.  In particular the C2, dual channel compressor, and D2, dual channel 3 band dynamic EQ proved to be what people had been waiting for – analogue sounding perfect dynamics but with the advantages of digital  – repeatability, AES inputs and outputs, pristine sound quality.  And of course lots of knobs and lights which every engineer likes 😉

Eventually when we were forced to discontinue the Series 2 units, of course everyone suddenly realises how good they are, and how much they rely on them and wants to order more!  The only option was to either build them again with new guts (expensive development and eventual probably expensive units) or take advantage of what we had learned over the course of the SiDD and Series 2 development and use this to enhance something we already had.

So the new flagship is the DP548 – everything you love about the DP448 plus the equivalent of a pile of Series 2 processing for little more than the cost of a single C2.  You get the equivalent of 4 D2s thrown in (one across each input), and 8* C2s (one on each output).  Add to that the fact that we have also opened up the routing to allow matrix mixing from any input to output (you can still do traditional routing if you want) AND you get the ability to store and recall dynamics settings (can’t do that with knobs!).  Of course, being a DP product means it’s also integrated into AudioCore for an amazing level of control and detailed monitoring if you want it.

Like I said – there’s not much it doesn’t do (you’ve still got all the power of the high slope crossovers, the PEQs which you can swap to a multitude of different behaviours including esoteric ones like elliptical and resonant, the two stage limiters, the Graphic EQs etc. etc.), so come to Plasa and see it in action.

Digital dynamics are dead – long live digital dynamics!
Preliminary datasheet is available here:  https://www.xta.uk.com/pdfs/DP548_prelim_info.pdf

*OK so technically it’s only the power of 4 C2 compressors, but as all 8 channels are linkable in any combination it’s as useful as 8 individual units…I think so anyway.