Muse Research invited the San Francisco AES chapter to the Digital Annex studio in Menlo Park to present the recently released Receptor, a rack-mount synthesizer and effects box, and provide tours of the facility.

VP of Sales Keith Borman gave a run-down of the machine's main features and then allowed DSP Architect Dan Timis discuss these in more detail. Finally, Rick Escobar, Quality Assurance and Support manager, plugged in his electric guitar for a final demo.

The audience of 31 learned that the Receptor was designed to replace racks of musical equipment and to provide an alternative to running VST plug-ins on fragile laptops during live events. The Receptor is essentially a special-purpose PC in a 2-unit rack form factor. It sports a 40 GB hard drive, motherboard with an AMD Athlon 2500+, and 256 MB of memory (user-upgradeable to 2 GB). Special order machines have been shipped with 160 GB drives. Five USB 2.0 ports allow the customer to connect a QWERTY keyboard, mouse, external hard drives, and other peripherals. It uses an optimized version of Linux to provide a small OS footprint, low latency behavior, and a fast boot-up time. Wine runs on top of Linux to support Windows-based plug-ins.

The Receptor can be run in stand-alone mode using controls on the front panel or via keyboard, mouse, and VGA monitor. The built-in 100Base-T Ethernet connection allows the machine to be connected to a Mac or PC for file management, upgrades, and remote control. Using this arrangement, several Receptors can be run from one computer to increase the number of instruments and effects.

To reduce cable clutter, Muse Research has announced a new feature called UniWire that transmits audio, MIDI, and control data over Ethernet. With UniWire the latency between the Receptor and other computers is in the 5-15 millisecond range depending on the audio sample buffer size and number of CPU processing cycles required by the effect. UniWire is still in development, but we were shown a demo at this meeting.

IP protection is provided by Pace iLok USB Smart Key that stores software authorizations for plug-ins and other applications. A recessed USB port on the front panel allows the iLok to be mounted securely.

Thomas Merklein