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On 25 jun 2006, at 05.07, Krispen Hartung wrote: > I'd like to get your thoughts on the Eventide Eclipse, TC > Electronic Fireworx, TC Electrronics G-Force, and Lexicon PCM81. Hi Kris, I own a Fireworx and I have once borrowed an Eclipse for two months (to decide which one I should go for and also to write a test review of the Eclipse for a guitar player magazine here in Sweden). I finally went for the Fireworx because I found one on a sale at a very good price. I also like that the Fireworx is smaller and lighter. The Eclipse is quite big and heavy. But sound-wise I think they are rather equal. What the Eclipse has that you won't get with the Fireworx is the option to use pre-programmed scales for the pitch shift function. This means you can use a MIDI footpedal to change scale and have the machine add two notes behind the note you are playing, thus creating three piece chords that follow the scale of the key. To do that with the Fireworx you have to stay away from the third note when programming the patch, so you can play either a "major" or a "minor" third with your live instrument while having the machine adding fifths or quarter intervals behind you. In a way I like this "musician-craft" approach better, because it's more free and doesn't lock the performer into a given key. It took some time to get into how to program the Fireworx, but since I finally managed to wrap my brains around it I just love it. Both the Fireworx and the Eventide lack the CPU power to play patches that use all available effects. Especially high resolution reverb is using lots of CPU. So you have to constantly zap between patches when you perform and lay down loop layers. One final word on the Fireworx's effect feeback loop: it sucks because of latency. When setting up patches inside the Fireworx you can put a "feedback send" or "feedback return" at any place of the effect chain. This means that part of the signal will be sent to the units physical feedback output and retrieved from the feedback input (digital or analog - but if you use the main analog input for your signal source/instrument only the digital effect send is available, and vice versa) But the signal is getting so delayed in that process that it's not usable. Speaking about "effect loops" there is also another kind of effect loop that you can set up completely inside the Fireworx program, but this is another thing and it's working perfectly well (define an "insert send" at any part of an effect chain and retrieve that signal with a "insert return" block at an earlier part so you can "cook" the sound even more by going through the same effects again. It's a quite open system and if you have the theoretical knowledge about how to create certain sound with the normal effect arsenal you should be able to come up with almost everything on a fireworx - as long as the CPU power stays with you that is ;-) However, you can hook up the Fireworx digitally in an effect loop to some other software or hardware and then there is no latency at all. I sometimes use the Fireworx in Logic, connected digitally to the RMX Multiface audio interface and in praxis it's just as having a bunch of new - non CPU bogging - plug-ins. This option also comes with the Eclipse, but I never tried it. Greetings from Sweden Per Boysen www.boysen.se (Swedish) www.looproom.com (international) http://tinyurl.com/fauvm (podcast) http://www.myspace.com/looproom