Sound quality - CPU efficiency equilibrium

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fluffy_little_something wrote: That's a bit unrealistic, don't you think? :) I guess as a rule of thumb one might say that the better the sound quality, the bigger the CPU load.
it's sad to think like this, because it adds marketing to laziness, as another reason for programmers not to optimize anything.
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tony tony chopper wrote:
fluffy_little_something wrote: That's a bit unrealistic, don't you think? :) I guess as a rule of thumb one might say that the better the sound quality, the bigger the CPU load.
it's sad to think like this, because it adds marketing to laziness, as another reason for programmers not to optimize anything.
I don't think good developers do that. I remember the guy who made the Oberheim clone. When he first introduced his project the first versions were incredible hogs, but he kept improving it and months later CPU usage was down to normal levels, though still higher than many other synths, but then again, it also sounds better than most other synths.

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It all really depends. Using more CPU doesn't necessarily mean better audio quality, but as a general rule it could maybe mean that, or dodgy programming, or both. On the other hand a VST using low CPU can be programmed really efficiently and sound great or sound bad, either. So everything is relative, as some very smart boffin said. ;)

Having said that, I do think that using more CPU means better audio quality in the majority of cases. :hihi:
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I have read repeatedly that developers and others say, if a synth is a CPU hog, just freeze the tracks which use it.
So, I was playing around with the freezing option of my DAW (never really cared about it), and wondering how you fine tune your song when you have half a dozen frozen tracks. I mean, things like cutoff, resonance or envelope stages have to be changed right there in the synth, so I have to unfreeze the track again. Basically I would have to unfreeze all tracks when trying to fine-tune and mix all tracks. And on my AMD CPU I can just forget about that with most modern synths.
So, what is the point of that freezing recommendation? :roll:

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Well, I tend to use simplest plugins, mostly stock DAW ones plus Sylenth. I can play few last tracks live the same way as they are rendered later on along with master chain. My PC is 4 years old now.

I know that big, high-end plugins are tempting, but how much of its features can you actually use? Don't these plugins run some mysterious algorithms in the background and consume your CPU? can't you achieve same results with something simpler?

Also, I don't synthesize percussion apart from kick. Additionally Ableton allows to nicely "flatten" tracks, rendering sounds processed with FX to samples.
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Plugins that use a lot of CPU are the ones that model analogue hardware very close. There is no way to do it with low CPU usage than the usual digital plugins.

Intel has a new socket and CPU i7 Haswell-E 8 core & 6 core they need the new motherboard with socket 2011+3 DDR 4 RAM.
With that amount of power no DAW should give you a problem running analogue modelled plugins.

u-he Hive One out in December uses less CPU than Sylenth1 and does the same job.
u-he Zebra a digital synth uses very small amount of CPU.

For older computers that are around 7 years old and overclocked you can get by using lots of analogue emulated plugins.
You can free up CPU by using effects on sends and freeze the drum track. EQ and compressors still need to be on inserts. Another thing to look at is the buffer you should be fine with just under 10ms no need to run your mix at 2MS. Run the DAW at 48khz you can set it higher when you finish for a better render.
Last edited by Kaboom75 on Thu Oct 30, 2014 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Kaboom75 wrote: Intel has a new socket and CPU i7 Haswell-E 8 core & 6 core they need the new motherboard with socket 2011+3 DDR 4 RAM.
With that amount of power no DAW should give you a problem running analogue modelled plugins.
desktop CPU's aren't evolving much. Those days when your new PC was 5x faster than the previous one 3 years before, are over (since 2008 I'd say).
Even the crazy # of cores that were promised 5 years ago, aren't even there (& having hundreds of cores wouldn't help that much, anyway).
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I'm using an intel 920 i7 4 cores from six or seven years ago . Ableton live and u-he plugs split their load across as many cores or threads that you computer has. If I get the Haswell-E 8 core this will double the cores and add a third more Mhz. It's not more than double the power for most programs but it will be for Ableton live. When enabling the multicore mode on u-he synths the CPU saving is massive proving that multiple cores works.

If more cpu cores don't improve your DAW then your OS or DAW are not coded for using multiple threads. Ableton live is the only one I know of that runs each track on it's own core with no limits to how many cores and threads it can use. I hear many in the Ableton forums that this doesn't work with more than four threads if running Ableton Live on Windows XP but I don't know if they were using enough tracks to show it in the task manager.

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Adding a core doesn't necessarily make things faster. If you don't have anything that your sequencer can do in parallel at that time (like, you have a reverb on a synth, obviously the reverb can't start before the synth has ended), an extra core isn't gonna help.
More, threading has a (giant) cost, meaning that if you only have a little reverb to do in parallel, the cost of the threading will be higher (especially at small latencies) than the one of the reverb.

For a 3D render, that doesn't have to spit out results every 3ms, wasting a few hundreds microseconds in thread switching isn't gonna hurt, but for audio it does.
..and I'm not even talking about memory cache shared/not shared between cores.
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More cores can moderately help, but it's *nowhere near* a faster CPU, like we used to get until 6 years ago.

(sry I keep quoting instead of editing)
Last edited by tony tony chopper on Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Well multicore CPUs work for me I'm not making it up. My current CPU is 3.4Ghz my next the 6 core HAswell-e will run at 4Ghz at least maybe higher. I'll end my input to this here.
Last edited by Kaboom75 on Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Kaboom75 wrote:Well multicore CPUs work for me I'm not making it up. I'll end my input to this here.
How have you measured it? For n tasks, how many more do you get for 2x more cores? n*2, that's just impossible.
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tony tony chopper wrote:
Kaboom75 wrote:Well multicore CPUs work for me I'm not making it up. I'll end my input to this here.
How have you measured it? For n tasks, how many more do you get for 2x more cores? n*2, that's just impossible.
Turn off multicore mode on all u-he synths I get crackle and the CPU meter goes over 90% Turn multicore mode back on it sounds nice again and CPU meter below 75%

Turn Lives multicore option off the same thing lots of crackle.

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I am moving towards samples now. I have already wasted too much time on synths, which at the end of the day just don't deliver most real instruments in a convincing way, which, however, is what I have been using synths for most of the time. I don't want to make that omnipresent synth instrumental crap music...

Samples sound better and cause just a fraction of the CPU load compared to synths.

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