Sound On Sound UK May 2020

It’s hard to believe, but I’m just starting my 30th year with Sound On Sound. Every year I think about retirement, and every year I somehow talk myself out of it. Working with Sound On Sound is just too much fun to give up! However, I could use a little more ‘me time’, so while still not retiring, I am handing over the Editor In Chief baton next issue to Sam Inglis. Sam has been a key member of the editorial team for 22+ years, latterly in his role as Features Editor. He is well known by the industry and SOS readers, is active in our Forum community and fronts many of our YouTube videos. In most respects, though, it will be business as usual; I’ll continue in an editorial…

Polyend introduce Tracker The term ‘tracker’ describes an early form of sequencing that originated on the Commodore Amiga, where music is arranged on a timeline that scrolls from top to bottom, rather than left to right as in modern piano-roll and drum grid editors. To people used to modern DAWs, those early trackers, with their Teletext-like interfaces and scrolling note numbers, look positively arcane, but to the people who grew up with them, they were unbeatable for speed, and were used to devastating effect by artists like Venetian Snares and Remarc. Today, they’re considered something of a curio by most, but there’s still a hardcore of artists — including jungle producer Pete Cannon, who we visited recently to film one of our in-depth Video Features — using them today, either on original…

About three years ago, Apple disclosed that they were working on a new Mac Pro. It would be a rethink that offered a modular architecture, acknowledging that there are many types of professional workflow with differing requirements. And, to this end, it would also be adaptable, allowing Apple to maintain the state-of-the-art with more frequent updates that could incorporate the latest components. As long-time followers of Apple will know, such a discussion concerning unannounced products is highly unusual; but this was something of a highly unusual situation for the company and their flagship Mac product. Four years earlier, in 2013, professionals had been clamouring for a new Mac Pro. The then-current model hadn’t been upgraded in years, had a decade-old chassis, and the growing discontent compelled Apple into giving a ‘sneak…

PROS • Every aspect of the system has been engineered with performance in mind. • Highly configurable before purchasing, and highly expandable afterwards. • Available in a rackmountable frame. CONS • The baseline storage is a relatively meagre 256GB. • Though this is not necessarily a negative, you get what you pay for. SUMMARY The new Mac Pro is clearly the Mac Pro musicians and audio engineers who demand the ultimate in performance and flexibility have been waiting for, positioning Apple with a Mac hardware platform to satisfy the company’s creative professional customers for the next decade.…

The next step in GPU performance from the standard Radeon 580X MPX Module is the Radeon Pro Vega II (PVII) MPX Module, costing an additional and not inconsequential £2160. Before continuing, from a performance perspective it’s worth remembering that music and audio applications are not graphically intensive in a way that would benefit from adding large amounts of graphic computing power to a Mac. Even technologies that use GPUs for general-purpose computing, such as OpenCL, aren’t commonly employed for audio signal processing in mainstream applications. So the only practical reason to contemplate upgrades to the graphics system is if you need different display configurations. Whereas the 580X MPX Module has two rear HDMI 2.0 ports, the PVII MPX Module has a single HDMI 2.0 port accompanied by four Thunderbolt 3 connectors…

After retiring the company’s popular Cinema Display range in 2011, Apple announced a return to this market at WWDC with a new display to accompany the Mac Pro: the Pro Display XDR. Offering a Retina 6K resolution with 6016x3384 pixels, the Pro Display XDR is a 32-inch LCD, offering edge-to-edge glass with borders of just 9mm, and uses the same design language as the Mac Pro for reasons that are again as functional as they are aesthetic. The XDR nomenclature refers to Extreme Dynamic Range, meaning you can expect impressive levels of brightness — 1000 nits sustained with a peak of 1600 — with an equally impressive contrast of 1,000,000:1. A typical computer display might offer around 350 nits with a contrast ratio of 1000:1. The Pro Display XDR connects via…