I completely understand your perspective, and I share much of it. But I don’t believe our expectations were unrealistic – many of these things are reasonable to expect to work smoothly at this level. It’s a bit disappointing there haven’t been more new algorithms (I’d love to see a really dense reverb making full use of the H9000’s capabilities; I remember this being promised a few years back). But it is not about that.
What surprised me most was the limited 96kHz support for algorithms. My whole system runs at 96k, so it took quite a while for this feature to arrive, and I think it was fair to expect that it would be there from the start. But since the last update, it’s OK.
Similarly, there were promises of a fully integrated DAW mode with automatic compensation. It’s not the end of the world, because there’re workarounds, but honestly, at this price point, a workaround shouldn’t really be needed.
There are a few other things like this : boot time, reliability (roughly one out of ten boots I have to restart), and sometimes clock sync issues with Windows – if I leave everything alone, it’s fine for weeks, but the moment I change anything, I can end up spending thirty minutes fixing the sync windows-H9000.
To be clear, all these issues have been discussed in the forums for 4-5 years – they’re not wild requests, just things that many users would reasonably hoped to see addressed before an hardware upgrade.
I just wanted to add that I ordered the upgrade – I still trust Eventide, despite everything I’ve written here. But that’s not the case for everyone: over the past few days, I’ve noticed quite a few used H9000 units being put up for sale. I think that’s at least a sign that the offer to existing owners hasn’t convinced everyone.
