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Naturally, this new flagship Harmonizer continues Eventide's extensive catalogue of familiar and popular sound effects and signal processing, while also introducing some new ones. Each card can handle 32 channels of I/O - potentially giving the H9000 access to up to 96 channels in total! At the time of writing, MADI and Dante cards are available, but Ravenna and AES67 cards are also due for release very soon.
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But it also features a 16 I/O USB 2.0 interface to allow integration with a DAW, and even more impressively, the H9000 can accommodate up to three optional expansion cards. Like the previous H8000FW, which was restricted to eight audio channels, the H9000 is equipped with eight channels of analogue, AES3 and ADAT I/O on the rear panel.
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The H9000 is a fan-cooled, 2U rackmounting multi-channel effects processor with comprehensive I/O and control options. The effort was worthwhile, because the results sound impeccably good! Overview This 'automated listener' compared the output of each ported algorithm with that of the original, reporting any errors so that appropriate corrections could be implemented.
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They all needed to be converted, which is not a trivial task because it's not just about recompiling the source code - the different maths environments can produce different outputs for the same inputs, with slightly different-sounding results, which of course was deemed unacceptable! To ensure that the ported algorithms sound exactly the same as the old ones, under all possible conditions and settings, Eventide developed a special 'automated listener' program to analyse each and every algorithm with every possible parameter value (far beyond a practical task for human listeners). The benefits of the new platform are abundantly clear, but a tricky side-effect of such a radical change is that the massive library of effects algorithms developed by Eventide over the last 30 or 40 years can't run directly on the new platform. Interestingly, in the H9000, the quad-core ARM processors are mounted on removable cards, the idea being to allow easy upgrading of the device as and when even more powerful processors become available. Although the H9000 was hinted at in 2016, it has been in development for around five years, and the long time spent on R&D was mostly due to this model being built on a newly developed platform comprising multiple 32-bit floating-point ARM processors (previous models had been based on more traditional 24-bit fixed-point DSP). Of course, the relentless progress in processor power and memory capacities has allowed each new generation of Harmonizer to be far more powerful than the last, and it's little surprise that the new flagship H9000 Harmonizer represents a substantial leap forward in this respect from the eight-channel H8000FW that appeared in 2006. And they weren't limited to musical effects - for example, most of the alien/machine voice processing in the BBC's iconic 1978 radio comedy drama The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was also courtesy of an H949. Harmonizers also featured heavily in the creative guitar sounds and effects on albums from the likes of AC/DC, David Bowie, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, and many more. The more powerful H949 Harmonizer that followed soon became a mainstay of high-end recording studios and broadcasters, and found its way into the stage racks of many well-heeled musicians. In 1974 the brilliantly innovative H910 Harmonizer was an instant success, providing not only delays with modulation and feedback, but also playable pitch-shifting. This was back at the very beginnings of the digital audio revolution and, as with many contemporary companies, Eventide's early forays into ones and zeros were with variations on digital delay lines. The company started out in 1970 making auto-locators for Ampex multitrack tape recorders, but they first came to the attention of most musicians when they launched the Instant Phaser.
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The Eventide name has been revered in the recording studio world for as long as I can remember.
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Eventide's most powerful ever Harmonizer crams half a century of effects know‑how into a unit that's elegant, easy to use and - thanks to its upgradeability - completely futureproof.
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