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Native Instruments Maschine +


Larry Shelby

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1 hour ago, TheSteven said:

Drooled until I saw price $1399
Not in my budget - unless I find gold in my back yard.

Ironically, if you added up everything that Larry talked you into buying in the past, you would most likely  find at least $1,399 spent. Just sayin'.  ?

 

Edited by abacab
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4 hours ago, TheSteven said:

Drooled until I saw price $1399
Not in my budget - unless I find gold in my back yard.

Same here,  I'm digging under the kids bed looking for any lost allowance I gave them.

I have the small Maschine Mikro MK3, but I love using  it.

The Maschine + is  niece looking.

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The Maschine MK3 is $ 600 and the PC board (with NI's published specs) is about $ 140, totaling around $ 740 in terms of raw hardware cost.

So $ 1400 feels a biiiit pricey. That said, they did port the Maschine software to Linux.
And they brought back the metal finish from Maschine MK2, maybe it helps with heat dissipation.

As far as performance goes I actually tried out Maschine on a quad-core atom with 4 GB of ram and windows 10 and it actually ran pretty well, even with 3 or 4 instances of lighter vsts like Monark or Super8.

So the Maschine+ should actually work out alright with its custom linux distro running nothing but Maschine.

Edited by Cristian
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yeah. it ain't cheap. but not out of this world pricing. it seems to be priced in up there with the Akai MPC One which has similar standalone functionality.

I am not sure about this one.  I am a heavy Maschine user and have been on a  MK3 for about a year. my setup is  Jam and a MK3. I don't use the built in interface. I can't really see myself using a Maschine without the keyboard and computer and access to the VSTs and Komplete.

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15 hours ago, Cristian said:

The Maschine MK3 is $ 600 and the PC board (with NI's published specs) is about $ 140, totaling around $ 740 in terms of raw hardware cost.

So $ 1400 feels a biiiit pricey. That said, they did port the Maschine software to Linux.
And they brought back the metal finish from Maschine MK2, maybe it helps with heat dissipation.

As far as performance goes I actually tried out Maschine on a quad-core atom with 4 GB of ram and windows 10 and it actually ran pretty well, even with 3 or 4 instances of lighter vsts like Monark or Super8.

So the Maschine+ should actually work out alright with its custom linux distro running nothing but Maschine.

Give it some time , studio was 990 euros at start , i bougth it 750 becaus ei knew distributor , and it went down finally ... i think we can expect a price lowering unless covid 20 comes lol ....

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15 hours ago, Zo said:

Give it some time , studio was 990 euros at start , i bougth it 750 becaus ei knew distributor , and it went down finally ... i think we can expect a price lowering unless covid 20 comes lol ....

I'm not really complaining. To be fair to NI, the price is competitive to MPC Live and MPC X.
And obviously the price is never going to be just the price of hardware: there's R&D costs that NI has to make up for as well.

In my case, I'm not really their primary customer given music is just a hobby for me and I haven't even really used my Mikro to its full potential.

Besides if I need it, in 6-7 months it'll be 25-35% off on the second-hand market, from richer hobbyists who bought it as an impulse purchase and now want their money back.

TBH my only question would be why NI went with the Z8350 and not the N4000 as a CPU, which is newer (2017 vs 2015) and better with similar costs.

Edited by Cristian
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34 minutes ago, Cristian said:

I'm not really complaining. To be fair to NI, the price is competitive to MPC Live and MPC X.

Machine + will be able to run decent (not amazing) Virtual-Instruments and EFX.

MPC Live has (at least when I owned it) no ability to run Virtual-Instruments... and the onboard EFX/processing was basic.

  • Record/Playback 8 tracks of Audio
  • Trigger Samples

IMO, Neither MPC Live nor Machine + have enough processing power to get excited about.

MPC Live could be flaky.   Sometimes, it would power-up and there'd be no sound (have to reboot to regain playback).

34 minutes ago, Cristian said:

TBH my only question would be why NI went with the Z8350 and not the N4000 as a CPU, which is newer (2017 vs 2015) and better with similar costs.

N4000:

  • Clock-speed = 1.1GHz
  • Max Turbo = 2.6GHz
  • 2 cores
  • 2 processing threads
  • Max RAM = 8GB

Z8350:

  • Clock-speed = 1.44GHz
  • Max Turbo = 1.92GHz
  • 4 cores
  • 4 processing threads
  • Max RAM = 2GB

 

With such low clock-speed, neither CPU is well-suited for working with low-latency audio (small buffer sizes).

At larger buffer sizes, the two additional cores on the Z8350 would allow greater loads.

N4000 has slightly higher Turbo (Boost) frequency... but lower Base clock-speed.

Tight enclosure means relatively small cooling; neither CPU will run Max Turbo for extended periods.

 

As a point of reference, the new i9-10900k will run all 10 cores (20 processing threads) locked at 5.3GHz.

 

When working at smallest ASIO buffer sizes, clock-speed is the single most important factor.

ie:  Working at 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size isn't something that lends itself to being heavily multi-threaded (spread across cores).

In this scenario, the 32-sample buffer size means the CPU has 1/3 of a millisecond to process the next audio buffer and get it cued for playback.

If anything interrupts this process, you'll experience a glitch.

More cores is beneficial, but not at the expense of significant clock-speed.

Performance increase from adding cores doesn't scale 1:1.  IOW, Doubling the number of cores doesn't double performance.

Generally speaking, the more cores... the harder it is to achieve highest clock-speed (especially across all cores).

In a perfect scenario, you want highest clock-speed... and most cores available.

 

 

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2 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

When working at smallest ASIO buffer sizes, clock-speed is the single most important factor.

ie:  Working at 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size isn't something that lends itself to being heavily multi-threaded (spread across cores).

In this scenario, the 32-sample buffer size means the CPU has 1/3 of a millisecond to process the next audio buffer and get it cued for playback.

If anything interrupts this process, you'll experience a glitch.

More cores is beneficial, but not at the expense of significant clock-speed.

Performance increase from adding cores doesn't scale 1:1.  IOW, Doubling the number of cores doesn't double performance.

Generally speaking, the more cores... the harder it is to achieve highest clock-speed (especially across all cores).

In a perfect scenario, you want highest clock-speed... and most cores available.

 Thanks for the breakdown.

I had to write a mobile app that dealt with video streaming around 2012, so I have a (tiny?) bit of first hand experience with anemic CPUs being unable to fill up the audio buffer in time.

Yeah, increasing the core count won't come close to a linear performance increase because the lion's share of any modern application still runs on a single thread, and splits up tasks among cores wherever it can. And while you can do parallel signal processing, the synchronization can be a nightmare. Even then it still falls on the main thread to fill the audio buffer.

After reading a bit more I think NI's choice of CPU might also have to do with them going with Linux as the Atom has been in a LOT of Linux devices.

And unlike my initial thoughts, cost may be an issue too since N4000 only supports DDR4 (preferably dual-channel, as it has more memory bandwidth).

The unit enclosure is also a great point, does the Maschine+ even have a fan?
If they went with passive cooling then yeah, that base frequency will matter more.

Also LOL the thought of even trying to compare the i9-10900 with these embedded CPUS ?

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1 hour ago, Cristian said:

Also LOL the thought of even trying to compare the i9-10900 with these embedded CPUS ?

Yeah, just trying to make the point as to why I'm not super excited by Machine +.  ?

It'll be enough to wet-the-appetite... but not capable of anything remotely close to a full-fledged DAW.

 

Lest I sound anti-Machine, I do like Machine as a "finger-pad" controller.

Best feeling pads of anything currently available...

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