Neural DSP Quad Cortex digital out

Its also pretty telling that people over at “the gear page” are rather surprised when they find out that digi out is not featured. Apparently for some its a no buy then, especially at that pricepoint. I can understand that sentiment.

Imo this device might be marketed by professional musicians in the future, who might legit not need a floor pedal with digi out, have it set up by their tech etc. But the largest group of buyers must have to be prosumers who are ready to spend 1600EUR for a new toy. All of these customers imo already have quite the equipment at hand. Being a group of hobbyist with wildly varying demands a device really should try to cater to as much of them as it can. Make it easy to implement it in existing environments. Its small and advertised in comparison to a mac book, so portability is a key design goal (which is great), also meaning you can use it for rehearsal, put it in a backpack and use it back home or at a friends place and of course live. In my case, our rehearsal room has a nice desk that can deal with analog and digi in, at home I have a genelec system hooked up to a (only) digi-in preamp, and live any mixer could use digi in. Its a powerful option to have.

No one would have decided to not buy because there is only one exp in insted of two, but I guess lots of people will be put of by the omission of digi out. Oh well…

The feedback on the last page on TGP, a 107 page thread:
“Deal-breaker for me. I use S/PDIF at home in the studio. Inexplicable why they’d leave that option off a higher end unit like this.”

“Same here. At home I use SPDIF to my Thunderbolt 2 audio interface which is way faster than USB.”

“For 1600 bones it should have that [digi-out]”

Personally, I’d rather have USB than SPDIF. Why would I want to run my source device into an interface and then run that signal into my computer when I can just plug my device straight into the computer, especially if I’m giving up 4 bits of depth (SPDIF standard is 20 bits, not 24)?

I also find it amusing that people consider it an indispensable “professional” protocol when it was conceived as a consumer standard. :rofl: Humor aside, I get how it fits into certain workflows and it’s unfortunate that the 4C doesn’t have it. I just don’t get the hand-wringing about it (though some folks on TGP manage to wring hands over a lot of surprising things).

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I said pros will most def not need spdif, but prosumers will.

Isn’t it kind of an inconvenience having to turn up your mac/pc just to use the device?
And no one ever said spdif or usb, its 2020, your audio equipment needs booth.

Not sure what you mean by “ Isn’t it kind of an inconvenience having to turn up your mac/pc just to use the device“. What workflow does SPDIF remove the need for a computer?

Hocking up the device on a stereo or preamp etc. I would hate to have to use my Mac every time I want to practice on the QC while using my speakers at home. In my case I cant hock up an analog out without jumping through hoops or rearrange all my cabling for just practice. And that’s just one example where additional I/O makes stuff simpler for more use cases.

So the use case is digital input into a non-computer? Guess I understand but don’t really “get” it. For non-recording scenarios, I just use analog outs. If I’m not recording, avoiding the extra conversion is not even close to being a big deal to me. If there’s no other digital processing in the chain, I don’t reduce latency but give up 12dB of bit depth.

Where I always thought digital I/O would be interesting was when using digital wireless. There’s still the bit depth issue but it would knock a bit off latency.

Pinging this thread to hear from anyone at Neural if there’s any talk about this.

I still think it’s a bit of a hole in the QC design and it’d be good to hear if there are plans for the future, and how these are gonna be constrained by the hardware design being released this year.

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Haven’t heard a thing and at this point don’t expect to. I would rather it have spdif but admittedly I have zero use for it. Being able to record wet and DI in my daw via the multi channel usb, along with the analog outputs should give me all the flexibility I need. Though yeah, I’d still rather have it than not.

Having the master volume knob deleted however as others have suggested unnecessary- I could not possibly disagree more with. In a live / loud situation and you start feeding back or something wonky happens- having to swipe and / or tap to level set would be a complete nightmare. I could get with the argument the knob itself should be more compact - if doing so would provide space for another feature. Multiple knobs for various outputs like in the iii would be cool but probably redundant as i’d imagine that should be doable in gig mode with rotary footswitches maybe?

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I am a long time Axe FX user and have been considering a switch but hearing there’s no other options for reamping other than USB is quite possibly a no go for me. Everything else aside, its just inconvenient to have to have to switch cables when I want to use the unit for recording, and as someone else has stated its a disappointing fail in forward thinking.

Now something that would possibly make up for this or possibly entice me to want to have a second thought is if they would make it viable interface for recording vocals as well. I could then use it as my primary interface unless I am tracking live drums or something of that nature.

Hope there is a plan for both spdif in and out (super important for syncing the device as a slave to a wordclock chain of interfaces) or AES/EBU if a larger enclosure is used in a future product.
I could not invest into it (even though I loved the sound ) for the same reason.