NDSP Quad Cortex

[mikah912]

The thing is...it's not really even missing a few amps. You can access about any amp with captures.

Yes....and no.

There is a considerable amount of stuff out there in the Cortex Cloud, no doubt. Too much of it is unorganized and one-offs.

The ridiculous lack of a marketplace means a lot of vendors only ever dipped their toes in. Don't get me wrong.....I appreciated the guys that went above and beyond providing free stuff like @Burger of Headfirst Amps. But I had visions of the likes of Live Ready Sound unleashing the full might of their amp/cab collections on QC, and it just never came to fruition due to the dumb implementation that makes it a chore to buy capture packs to this day.

 

[laxu]

NDSP stunted the growth of their product and failed to capitalize on an open market being one of the first digital units with such an awesome UI and having both modeling and capture tech

Interestingly it was also a lot of surrounding tech that they took nowhere.

They were one of the first with a cloud system. I remember sitting in a bus and browsing the QC cloud with my phone, picking up captures to load. Got home, fired up the QC and those captures then loaded onto it, ready for me to play. That was really cool!

I thought there would be things like an app store style marketplace where 3rd parties can sell captures, with NDSP taking a small cut of the profits by acting as a middleman and storage provider.

Instead giving access to people who bought your captures seemed like a bit of a chore in the system and there's no marketplace tools.

Afaik they never really enhanced the whole metadata system for captures either. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'll always give them shit for taking like 2 years to make the graphic EQ actually look like a graphic EQ. That was one of the first things I asked for when the QC was released, and I got the "should be easy" and "soon" answers. Sure, maybe a graphic EQ was not a priority...but a bunch of virtual knobs is not a graphic EQ!

 

[mbenigni]

Afaik they never really enhanced the whole metadata system for captures either. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'll always give them shit for taking like 2 years to make the graphic EQ actually look like a graphic EQ. That was one of the first things I asked for when the QC was released, and I got the "should be easy" and "soon" answers. Sure, maybe a graphic EQ was not a priority...but a bunch of virtual knobs is not a graphic EQ!

They did improve the metadata system for captures quite a bit. The problem is there were already so many captures "out in the wild" with no corresponding metadata, that cleaning it all up enough to make those new features useful is like trying to squeeze toothpaste back in the tube. I still feel mostly lost when I'm trying to find specific captures. If I'm being honest, I tend to under-use that aspect of the QC. The variety afforded by captures is a major selling point, but for me ease of use is much more important, and the two can often come at odds with one another. (In fairness, this is also true if I'm on e.g. FAS and find myself staring down 1000+ variations of Pissed Marshall™ - eventually my "would rather be playing guitar" reflex takes over.)

P.S. They made quite a show of solving the "We've got graphics and we've got graphic EQs, whatever shall we do??" riddle.

 

[mbenigni]

Been away from a QC for a while. I noticed I can toggle which output is active with the volume knob but it only shows momentarily when you actually turn the knob.

Is there a way to access this function in the menus? I didn’t see anything in the I/O screen.

Yes, it's still in the Device Options menu. See page 9 in the owner's manual:

https://downloads.neuraldsp.com/file/quad-cortex/Quad%20Cortex%20User%20Manual%20v3.1.0.pdf

 

[mbenigni]

Kinda crazy this is even a discussion…..again. I really thought after they got PCOM happening that was it, they’d tackled the biggest issue and it would be smooth sailing from there on out.

It all boils down to the fact that PCOM never meant "compatibility" in the typical sense of the word. Rather than achieving a state where the QC could run existing plugins, they managed to recreate the content from a couple of plugins for QC... by modifying both the plugins, and the QC firmware. Which means PCOM can waste everyone's time forever. That's great if you're looking for an alibi for your development team. Less great if you're a customer waiting on some unrelated feature...

 

[Los-D]

QC is a cool product and newcomers may not even understand the gripes (other than it being the noisiest piece of audio equipment I have ever used), but people on the original Tier 1/2 list know it’s been 5 years(!) since the original announcement (during the first Trump administration), and we are still talking about the same issues.

I think they had the killer device at Tier 1/2 announcement that likely would have been king still, though I am not sure the future bodes that well for them (unless they have been working on QC2 all this time, but doubt it based on their track record). The eNano Cortez looks really cool, but what guarantees it won’t suffer the same fate (features/updates-wise) as the QC?

 

[mbenigni]

Well, they should be lightning fast at banging out plugins after this!

We just need to introduce TINA to DELORES.

 

[DrewJD82]

(unless they have been working on QC2 all this time, but doubt it based on their track record).

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were happening, actually. They managed to sneak the NC out at a time when “all resources are being utilized for the QC”, now that PCOM is the main focus of the QC, that must free up the hardware guys who we’ve been told repeatedly are entirely different from the plugin guys. If the roadblock for frequent QC updates is the architecture of the unit itself and not management or lack of personnel, it’s probably in their best interest to get a new unit out that they can actually work with.

 

[Dez]

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were happening, actually. They managed to sneak the NC out at a time when “all resources are being utilized for the QC”, now that PCOM is the main focus of the QC, that must free up the hardware guys who we’ve been told repeatedly are entirely different from the plugin guys. If the roadblock for frequent QC updates is the architecture of the unit itself and not management or lack of personnel, it’s probably in their best interest to get a new unit out that they can actually work with.

That would have really put a sour taste in my mouth, especially since I’d have gotten a lot less for my QC if a new one was announced. If that’s what they need to do then that’s what they need to do though, at the end of the day. It would be a sort of “reset” for them and I’d hope they’d incentivize trade ins or something in that event for sure

 

[Los-D]

They managed to sneak the NC

Good call. Kinda shitty on their end, but it’s a business after all.

 

[Mongillo19]

I'd be shocked if they launched a QC2. Of course always room for advancement but I'm trying to think what the QC2 would have that can't currently be fixed via firmware for QC1

It has a very nice UI, touchscreen, encoders, etc. Most of what we want to see with current or next gen modelers already

 

[nicolasrivera]

The Quad Cortex Mini will probably see green light next year.

 

[mikah912]

I'd be shocked if they launched a QC2. Of course always room for advancement but I'm trying to think what the QC2 would have that can't currently be fixed via firmware for QC1

It has a very nice UI, touchscreen, encoders, etc. Most of what we want to see with current or next gen modelers already

So agreed. What hardware feature set are people clamoring for that's not already there? The missing link is firmware development and they're already stretched thin there.

 

[Los-D]

but I'm trying to think what the QC2 would have that can't currently be fixed via firmware for QC1

Grounding issues…

 

[mbenigni]

I'd be shocked if they launched a QC2. Of course always room for advancement but I'm trying to think what the QC2 would have that can't currently be fixed via firmware for QC1

It has a very nice UI, touchscreen, encoders, etc. Most of what we want to see with current or next gen modelers already

Noise floor. That's about it IMO.

 

[mikah912]

Noise floor. That's about it IMO.

Noise floor/grounding would just be a MKII tweak, tho, right?

 

[eggpl@nt]

Noise floor/grounding would just be a MKII tweak, tho, right?

Yeah wasn’t there some posts earlier in this thread about a redesign board and chassis (not referring to the CODEC, but another design update)?

 

[mbenigni]

Noise floor/grounding would just be a MKII tweak, tho, right?

If it's a hardware tweak it's $$$. The rest (MKII vs. QC 2, etc.) is just semantics.

 

[dws2384]

It will be a struggle for them for sure. Add in all kinds of international trade complications I'm not supposed to talk about, and it's a perfect storm, basically. QC will probably be an extremely low-margin sale for them - bordering on a loss-leader - for a while. I hope it doesn't kill the product, because I still think it's awesome, with (take this whichever way you prefer) lots of room to grow.

I think they're learning why hardware is a totally different ballgame than software.

 

[Elric]

It all boils down to the fact that PCOM never meant "compatibility" in the typical sense of the word. Rather than achieving a state where the QC could run existing plugins, they managed to recreate the content from a couple of plugins for QC. By modifying both the plugins, and the QC firmware. Which means PCOM can waste everyone's time for ever. That's great if you're looking for an alibi for your development team. Less great if you're a customer waiting on some unrelated feature...

Yes, was always a red herring for the QC in terms of development. Was clearly a monumental waste of time and resources in the practical sense even out of the gate to anyone who understood what they were saying… but likely sold a lot of units to folks who were sold on the plugins first and considered them the gold standard. So it likely helped them to be financially successful with the product but the product is actually worse for it in terms of what it can do, etc, IMHO. It’d actually be more capable if those resources had been directed elsewhere instead of that fool’s errand.

Feels almost like they have lost interest in even keeping the show up lately on that front too.

Like you say the idea that what they have done constitutes’compatibility’ is complete nonsense and pretty much an abuse of the term.