Hi Homer – glad you like our stuff. Here is an (I believe) honest response.
homer:
the fact that the company has not shown too much interested in creating an updated version of VSIG since 7 years
We
believe that only about 10% of our HarmonizerTM users use Vsig. To significantly
improve Vsig would be an enormous amount of work, and it is not clear to us that
enough people would use it to justify this.
People
who do not work in the software field often have little idea how much work
(many man-years) is involved in producing a modern quality application – this
is very difficult to justify for a small population. As an example, many of the
specialist software tools we use are riddled with bugs, and yet cost many
$1000.
homer:
And all of this for a 5500 Euro price tag.
Vsig
is a free utility, not included in the price of an H8000FW.
homer:
it is outright annoying that you haven't been able to put out a working OSX version
We
would certainly like an OSX version, but this is again a lot of work to benefit
not many people. We have worked on a cross-platform version, but this has not
proved to have adequate graphics performance.
homer:
Not being able to edit or control the unit via Firewire in 2014
Don't
understand this – the H8000FW supports MIDI over FireWire, so any OS or
application that will drive this will be fine.
homer:
at some point as a professional you feel abandoned with the current state of affairs for Vsig
We
create all our algorithms with Vsig – this is why we wrote it. It is certainly
not perfect, but we find it to be entirely useable.
homer:
only a repackaging of the old stuff
While
a number of the Stompbox algorithms are indeed based on those in Harmonizers,
an enormous amount of work has been done to both improve them, and to fit them
to the different form factor. Calling it "repackaging" somewhat underestimates
what has been achieved. One of the most common requests we receive is to
support the Stompbox algs on the rack products – this rather confirms their
value
homer:
Why should I go all in now apart from sound quality?
What you would find in a Harmonizer is, as you say, sound
quality, but also:
-
The ability to design your own algorithms – flawed though you
may consider the tools to be, they work, and the range of modules is huge. - A vast number of included algorithms (way over 1000 on H8000).
-
A wide range of connectivity (FireWire, AES, SPDIF, ADAT) –
you'll not find many boxes that handle all this (with routing as well).
