PowerWhore X-H8
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
I’m going to give TC about two more weeks, then I’m going to have a brand new PowerCore X8 for sale on the cheap. The amount of time they’re taking with Vista drivers is absolutely ludicrous. I have to be honest and say that I would have given them about the same amount of time as I gave Lynx originally, which was two months after the release of Vista. This has gone far beyond an understandable hiccup, and is simply irresponsible on their part.
Vista was released on Nov. 30th, 2006, if you were curious. That was 18 months ago. It was generally stable for professional use (as long as you didn’t own any M-Audio products, and why on Earth would you if you were a professional? They make plastic Chinese crap…) by March of last year. That was 13 months ago. I fail to see how a company the size of TC Electronic couldn’t manage to build and beta-test a working FW driver and set of plugins in that amount of time. It simply defies logic, unless your logic wanders along these lines: “well, Vista sukz, and XP rulez, so we’re not gonna bother until X number of customers complain.”
I’ve tested the unit extensively with my iMac, and I liked the included plugins enough to exhibit a far larger measure of patience than I would normally, once I got over my initial shock that it wasn’t Vista compatible. I even made a tentative list of plug-ins that I was going to purchase, once I had it running with my main music computer. I figure the unit is worth it for VSS3 alone, quite frankly. That is a hell of a reverb.
But in all honesty, I have far better things to do with $1500 than have it literally sit in a hole in my production rack depreciating. If TC hasn’t released Vista drivers by two Fridays hence (5/16) I’m going to offer this unit for sale for a ludicrously cheap price, and some lucky XP or OS X user can have the benefit of my costly mistake in trusting a company to be responsible.
(Note: I posted a similar comment in the TC forums because I’m not the sort to hide behind my blog.)
10 comments
bummer. why not just switch everything over to the imac. (ducks to avoid punch)
it is pretty surprising that they don't even have a beta version of a driver available. have they posted any word on their site as to when to expect a vista handshake?
"some time in Q2 2008."
-CR
Fuck anyone that doesn't support Vista.
Dibs.
I mean, i hope it works out and everything, but if not- let me know.
(insert slew of emoticons here...)
This will get fixed when a bunch of overpaid asskissing suits notice a drop in the TC profit margin at a future quarterly sales meeting and got to save their asses before the CEO's right hand man does some house cleaning, and they run out of piss-ons, programmers and excuses to blame it on.
Second thought word of mouth is an enemy to this company during the driver waiting game. They are riding the XP pony tooo long, they are getting by on bullshit fodder their marketing genius creates and puts out there to the guitar playing sheep!
Either that or they spent too much money on making them purdy interfaces, and the bank wont give em more money for development until they sell a few.
Maybe they should give Behringer a call!
I don't think the company is all that big. But any company that has a department specifically for marketing has issues like this. Even in Audio Damage, the marketing department (me) can easily browbeat the Rocky Mountain R&D Division (Adam) in to doing something foolish.
I was having a conversation last night with [redacted], one of the DSP engineers behind the [redacted] DAW-savvy hardware, and he said to me that the Windows side of things was not a priority, because the marketing department at [redacted] had not directed them to make it so. The marketing department, who are nominally in charge of turning customer feedback in to company directives, has a lot of power, and the larger the company, generally the more power it has.
-CR
Yeh, they're not too zappy with the Vista update...gotta say though life is good in mac osx with the powercore and that's an awful lot of power to go to waste waiting...
Reminds me, how long did it take for TC to sort their audio interface driver problems out? Are they still completely sorted out?
Based on all the TC stuff I've tried out, somehow I've always felt that they know how to make insanely good fx algos and damn good hardware & converters but they haven't quite grasped the whole driver development thing as well as some other companies. The amount of problems and complaints about PoCo (initially?) and Konnekt drivers (up to a few months ago at least, from both friends and Teh Internets) has pretty much convinced me that I should be really careful in case I intend to buy any of their computer hardware stuff... Even though Konnekt DAC sounds damn awesome for the price and some of the PoCo plugins are praised a lot.
Talking about TC. An AD spatial expander based on the 1210 maybe?
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