Nucleus Vs. V-Studio

[Orren]

Hi all,

 

I'm looking at high end control surfaces with some I/O and talkback options, and both the SSL Nucleus and Cakewalk V-Studio 700 look pretty amazing. Does anyone have experience with both of them? How do they compare?

 

Thanks!

Orren

[Anderton]

Hi all, I'm looking at high end control surfaces with some I/O and talkback options, and both the SSL Nucleus and Cakewalk V-Studio 700 look pretty amazing. Does anyone have experience with both of them? How do they compare? Thanks! Orren

 

Well...I haven't worked with the Nucleus, but you can catch a video demo of it from AES.

 

However, I have worked a lot with the V-Studio 700. My first take is that if you're going to be using Sonar, the V-Studio - although it's Mackie-compatible - has so many features designed specifically for the program that if you use features like ACT and like dedicated shortcuts, that this would be a logical choice. Also, the interface includes Fantom synth hardware, so you have a synth "in the box" that doesn't have latency issues or take power from the CPU. The editing software for it is pretty cool, too.

 

Both the V-Studio and Nucleus are USB, so there's equivalency there. The Nucleus includes Duende signal processing, but of course, you can get the external Duende box and use that with Sonar if that's important to you. The other aspect of Nucleus that the V-Studio doesn't have is that it's designed to switch easily among multiple programs. As mentioned the V-Studio is Mackie-compatible, but at least from the AES demo, it seems Nucleus goes beyond that.

 

As to interfacing capabilities, I don't really know what's inside Nucleus, but the V-Studio interface has good mic pres and they're digitally-controlled - VERY handy if you have particular setups you use. For example, I do a lot of narration, and it's convenient to just punch up the narration preset and know levels, EQ, and dynamics are set for that channel.

 

Hope this helps! Anyone else have comments?

[Anderton]

Also - there are also some videos on the Cakewalk site about the Fantom synth included in the V-Studio package.