posted 30 October 2010 10:17            

I was going to ask if it was possible to setup up a Pacabara for + 64k, but a rummage has illuminated this as a flame bottleneck.

'The analogue conversion on the Capy is better than most soundcards' (Discuss)

If there was an audio interface that was supported by the Paca that had spdif/AES at 88.2, would it be possible to hang the Capy from it with no flame, and take advantage of it's conversion?

Should I consider selling my Capy, (or indeed forcing it upon a friend and demand he learns some Kyma to prove his manhood) and putting the money into a recently made interface, perhaps at risk of the converters not operating at full scale. (I like to interface with decent analogue boards occasionally, and always thought the capy coped with the signals very well compared to many 'prosumer' audio interfaces.

The capy is big, and a 1u rack or less would make the whole rig much more portable.

I am very attached to my capy. It has served me very well, I know and love it's sound.

Am I being unreasonably emotional and should just get over it?

posted 30 October 2010 11:16            

So I ended up going down more typical path of a new Soundcard (TC Konnekt48), which in turn gets its IO from a second soundcard (Profire 2626) using ADAT; the Profire serves as the computer's main soundcard. But this setup is still not particularly friendly to high sample rates. The limitation, as it turns out, is Firewire data capacity. Without going through al the gory details you need a dedicated Firewire bus (meaning adding a Firewire card to your computer) if you have the need for more than a handful of audio paths. Since my conception of using Kyma includes using it like an external EFX rack I need more than a nominal stereo pair!

Now that I have lived with the Capybara and Pacarana for a while what I have observed is that the Capybara is rarely used (except for day job activities). Its a shame really as mine was fairly capable (10 DSPs) and I was quite satisfied with it before the Pacarana blew me away with all its oomph. But at the end of the day I have yet to find myself short on DSP.

The Capy's A/D/A converters were once far superior to anything I could afford but its not clear to me that the difference compared to today's "better" soundcard offerings is material. Furthermore for my workflow the biggest benefit of the superior D/A is during monitoring, and I am fairly confident that my studio lacks a mastering room's acoustics for me to be able to hear any difference.

Besides at least in my situation the audio remains in the digital domain for its entire journey, except when monitoring. What ends up as finished product on the hard drive need not ever pass through converters. Of course if I had to route Kyma output through a quality analog bit of kit and then back in I would perhaps change my tune. Then again probably not. When I do this though my analog modular the modular itself adds so much character the A/D/A differences are way too subtle for muy ears. Even if they were would the complexity, and restrictions, justify any advantage?

I'm committed to keeping the Capybara if for no other reason than my "day job". I think I could use it most productively by pairing it with a second (spare, older) Mac and running Kyma on both that Mac, and my main computer (two Kymas, twice the fun!). Route its audio I/O to a mixing desk or into the main computer's soundcard. With a large enough LCD monitor you can comfortably have both Kyma's running on the same screen by using OSX screen sharing. OSX's screen shared works amazingly well when you have a proper GigaEthernet connection between the two computers!

Having two concurrent Kyma setups may seem like craziness (it is) but at least its a usable way to keep the Capybara from feeling abandoned. What I envision is having more or less "stock" effects or synths always running on the Capybara and reserving Kyma on the Pacarana as it was intended - a sandbox for sonic play.

With this set up you still have the option, when needed, to use the full glory of the Capybara's converters. Even if your Kyma creations totally max out the Pacarana you can still capture a digital version and then play that back through the Capybara.

At this point these are ruminations and nothing more.

Doug