SOUNDCRAFT REALTIME RACK READY TO LOAD
20 June 2014
More news from the Harman booth at InfoComm, it seems Soundcraft is demonstrating the new Soundcraft Realtime Rack–a library of over 70 award-winning UAD plug-ins.
The Realtime Rack includes 74 of Universal Audio’s authentic hardware emulations & plug-ins and is a 1U (one rack unit) enclosure capable of processing up to 16 channels of a MADI stream, while additional units can be added for 32, 48 or 64 channels, the Universal Audio plugins are (of course) compatible with all Soundcraft Vi Series digital consoles.
The rack comes in two flavours: the Core comes preloaded with 14 classic Harman and UAD plug-ins, while the Ultimate comes fully loaded (as one would expect) with 74 plug-ins including emulations of legendary analog hardware from industry-leading brands such as Studer, Lexicon, dbx, Neve, Manley and more. The plugins themselves range from rare compressors and equalizers, to vintage reverb processors and tape machines, UAD Powered Plug-Ins inject three-dimensional ‘out-of-the-box’ analogue sound to your mixes (or so their marketing says).
The Rack software runs on Mac only and allows you to insert the UAD plug-ins on individual channels, auxiliary channels, and master busses. It has a (48 kHz) sub-2 millisecond latency and full snapshot store and recall with Soundcraft’s CUE/Snapshot system. One Realtime Rack can run 16 channel strips each with up to eight plug-ins inserted. Realtime Racks can also be daisy-chained to up to four units processing 64 channels simultaneously. The rack uses SHARC-based processors to run audio over standard Optical MADI connections and dual-redundant internal power supplies will ensure that audio signals keep running, even in the event of a power supply failure.
The rack is a much need addition to the Soundcraft console for it to stay competitive in the market. It’ll be interesting to see exactly how well the plugins perform once they’re being put to the test, we’ll keep you posted.
Key Features
| Hardware | |
| • | Durable 1U Rack enclosure |
| • | 4 SHARC DSPs on-board |
| • | Dual-redundant internal power supplies with failover detection |
| • | Each Realtime Rack unit processes up to 16 channels of a MADI stream (add additional units for 32, 48 or 64 channels) |
| • | Runs a huge library of UAD Powered Plug-Ins & UAD Direct Developer Plug-Ins |
| • | Dual-Thunderbolt host connectivity |
| • | One set of MADI optical I/O (64 channels @ 48 kHz) |
| • | Word Clock I/O (BNC) and Input termination |
| • | Sample Rate support from 44.1kHz to 96kHz |
| • | Clock Support for the following formats: Internal, MADI, Word Clock |
| Software | |
| • | Purpose-built Realtime Rack application for inserting UAD plug-Ins |
| • | Networked integration with select Soundcraft Vi consoles – allows full remote snapshot triggering and storing |
| • | Create, store and recall channel strip presets |
| • | Create, store and recall snapshots |
For the full list of UAD plugins, click here.
Sweetwater’s overview of the Soundcraft Realtime Rack when it was unveiled at NAMM 2014
Excerpts from Press Release
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