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Throwing up a storm of digital effects processes, tc's latest box combines professional processing with the reckless indulgence of early musicians' MIDI multieffects units. George Shilling has a ball
I WAS INTRIGUED to see a couple of die-hard, analogue-loving, colleagues were salivating over some new equipment. I presumed it was another valve compressor or some such thing - but no, they were thirsting for this new tc box. Surely those Danish digital boffins hadn't gone analogue? Not a chance. Their interest was aroused because this latest offering brings to a digital world treatments that were previously thought exclusive to obscure crackly old boxes from the 1970s. Wonderful effects such as vocoding and ring modulation, which are great, but difficult to do properly with the current crop of multieffects boxes, and hard to track down in original form. Not only that, but press releases mentioned fantastic unheard-of effects such as fractal noise generator and aliaser.
The FireworX looks similar to other recent tc units. It occupies a 1U-high case with the familiar large-ish green lcd screen on the front panel. Despite my one-man campaign for better legibility on studio equipment the multitudinous grey and black buttons are graced with tiny white lettering, the only colour provided by leds. Three continuous-type knobs grace the right-hand side, one intriguingly labelled alpha mod and accompanied by a row of leds. Over on the left are a couple of small knobs for input and output level - I like this a lot: if you want to tweak the level, you don't want to do it via a menu. However they will not completely kill the signal, having only a 32dB range of tweakage. Two rows of LEDs are provided for input level metering, but, strangely, an Overflow light situated below them blinked occasionally when input level was around -12dB to -6dB, and, occasionally, glitching was audible.
There are physical similarities with the Finalizer Plus model, such as a PC memory card slot on the front panel and that the entire back panel looks identical - stereo analogue inputs and outputs appear on XLR connectors.; digital inputs and outputs appear on optical connectors for ADAT or SPDIF, XLRs for AES-EBU and phono sockets for SPDIF. Internal resolution, A-D and D-A...