Thinking of getting an M3000...help please

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hemmick reef

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I have noticed a price drop in the UK for the M3000 reverb (£659). I have been using UAD-1 Realverb pro & SIR up to now but have never been happy, as the reverb sounds more like an effect than a truely saturated sound. I have tried the other demo verbs for UAD-1, and although good I still did not spend out for them.

Am I wasting my hard earned cash or will I be happy with the M3000?

Thanks
 
I also found that I can pick up the Powercore + Vss3 for £419.

Is the quality identical?
 
I've been very happy with the TC Powercore reverbs. The MegaVerb is based on the M-5000, and the ClassicVerb is more Lexiconish. When you consider that you can run several of these high quality verbs at once without bogging down your CPU, let alone that you also get the other included TC plugins, I think it's a good way to go, and it's one purchase I've never second guessed.
 
Robert D said:
I've been very happy with the TC Powercore reverbs. The MegaVerb is based on the M-5000, and the ClassicVerb is more Lexiconish. When you consider that you can run several of these high quality verbs at once without bogging down your CPU, let alone that you also get the other included TC plugins, I think it's a good way to go, and it's one purchase I've never second guessed.
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I have a UAD-1 card with Realverb pro, but I am not sure about the bundled P'core reverbs being better, that's why I wondered about the empty P'core + Vss3 for excellent reverb at £100 less than the bundled P'core card.
 
I missed the Vss3 part. I haven't heard one yet, but I''ve just now downloaded the demo and will check it out tonight. I can send you an MP3 or two of the results, but I don't know if that deal is something you need to jump on now or miss out. As far as the stock TC verbs, the conventional wisdom has been that UAD rocks for dynamics, and TC rocks for reverb.
 
Robert D said:
I missed the Vss3 part. I haven't heard one yet, but I''ve just now downloaded the demo and will check it out tonight. I can send you an MP3 or two of the results, but I don't know if that deal is something you need to jump on now or miss out. As far as the stock TC verbs, the conventional wisdom has been that UAD rocks for dynamics, and TC rocks for reverb.
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Yes that would be great, I'd like to hear it next to the other powercore reverbs :)
 
hemmick reef said:
Yes that would be great, I'd like to hear it next to the other powercore reverbs :)
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Ok, me too. I have this uneasy feeling that I'm about to experience a pain in the wallet region.
 
Well, I didn't have much time last night to spend getting very scientific about this, but here's some samples of VSS3, ClassicVerb, and MegaVerb - some female vocal, and some BFD drums. I made them pretty wet. Each clip repeats 3 times, once with each verb. I scrambled the order to remove any pre-concieved influence on which is better. Hope it helps, I'll let you know which is which.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=660845
 
Robert D said:
Well, I didn't have much time last night to spend getting very scientific about this, but here's some samples of VSS3, ClassicVerb, and MegaVerb - some female vocal, and some BFD drums. I made them pretty wet. Each clip repeats 3 times, once with each verb. I scrambled the order to remove any pre-concieved influence on which is better. Hope it helps, I'll let you know which is which.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=660845
Click to expand...

Thanks for the test :)

Tough. I didn't know that they would be so close. I don't know if you kept the same order for the drums and vocals but here goes:

Megaverb; Vss3; Classis for both tests.

By the way I have ordered the Powercore unplugged + Vss3 deal, as it's the cheapest way for me to get a really high quality reverb. I needed another card. Also I can just keep that one DSP card purely to run the reverb as I like the UAD-1 for compressors and eq.
 
Cool, there's a few folks running UAD and Poco side by side, and they love the combination. I think you'll be very happy. The Vss3 is a great sounding verb, though I still think the Classic and Mega verbs are quite good. My hastily created test files were hardly a great comparison, but I did try to use comparable algos and adjusted the pre-delays and sustain times for reasonable apple to appleness.

The order was:

Drums - ClassicVerb, MegaVerb, Vss3
Fem Voc - Vss, ClassicVerb, MegaVerb

for me, the VSS3 was much richer on the vocal, but needed some optimizing on the drums. I'm sure that will be no problem, given it's high degree of programmability. Enjoy!
 
Robert D said:
Cool, there's a few folks running UAD and Poco side by side, and they love the combination. I think you'll be very happy. The Vss3 is a great sounding verb, though I still think the Classic and Mega verbs are quite good. My hastily created test files were hardly a great comparison, but I did try to use comparable algos and adjusted the pre-delays and sustain times for reasonable apple to appleness.

The order was:

Drums - ClassicVerb, MegaVerb, Vss3
Fem Voc - Vss, ClassicVerb, MegaVerb

for me, the VSS3 was much richer on the vocal, but needed some optimizing on the drums. I'm sure that will be no problem, given it's high degree of programmability. Enjoy!
Click to expand...

Got that wrong didn't I :(

Oh well I'm sure it will be a great reverb though :)
 
Actually, I'm glad it wasn't so apparent. Now I don't feel so bad that I don't have $600 laying around to run out and buy the VSS3. :)

I ran a test on resource usage for my Powercore PCI card, and while the VSS3 used 50% of a single DSP chip (there's 4 on the card), it gobbled up 100% of that DSP's memory. So sure enough, I could only run 4 VSS3s. I never use more than 4 verbs in a song (usually 2 or 3), so no big deal, and getting 4 reverbs of that quality for that price is great. That will still leave you with half of each DSPs MIPS for running non time based effects like compression, which don't use memory. The TC Chorus (excellent) is time based, so you'll need some mem left over to run it.

For future reference and others using the search function on this topic;

VSS3 - 50% DSP usage of 1 DSP chip (1/8th of total DSP)
100% of memory usage for that DSP (1/4 of total memory)
can run 4 on a single Powercore

Megaverb - 28% DSP usage of 1 DSP chip (<1/12 of total DSP)
50% of memory usage for that DSP (1/8 of total memory)
can run 8 on a single Powercore

ClassicVerb - 34% DSP usage of 1 DSP chip (<1/10 of total DSP)
50% of memory usage for that DSP (1/8 of total memory
can run 8 on a single Powercore
 
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