M-Audio Torq & Xponent

[TrentenLD]

Great review

[Anderton]

Thanks! But I'm just getting started. This is a very deep setup, and it's obvious a lot of thought went into it.

[Chad Carrier]

Hi Craig (and hello to Gus--whassup!),

 

If you look at the front edge of the Xponent controller, you'll see a small switch for switching between "Bank A" and "Bank B". This switch is changing the MIDI Channels used when you tweak knobs and stuff. We've set this up to allow you to select the effects you're controlling with the Xponent's knobs. As you correctly noticed, you control the first two effect slots with Xponent when using Bank A. If you flip to Bank B, you'll end up controlling the third effect slot with the first two knobs and buttons, as well as the VST slot with the last two knobs and buttons.

 

As with everything in Torq, you can re-assign the MIDI control any way you wish just by right-clicking on a control on screen, then moving the hardware knob/slider/button you want to use for control. This enables you to completely remap the effect controls if you wish (i.e. Bank A to control slots 1 and 2 and Bank B to control slots 2 and 3).

[Anderton]

First of all...thanks Chad for monitoring this thread and contributing tips. I'm sure I would have figured out this stuff eventually, but you're definitely speeding up the learning curve.

 

Now as promised, more about the effects, and some audio examples...

 

Strobe (first audio example) pulses the music rhythmically, from 1/4 notes to 128th notes. The two controls affect rhythm and depth of the "strobe." In the audio example I have Strobe on full so it essentially "switches" between audio on and off, but you can have it switch from, say, half-on to off, as well as fade in the strobe effect.

 

Reverse (second audio example) has only one control - you push the button, and the sound reverses (or if you prefer, sesrever dnuos eht). Aside from doing psychedelic 60s effects and letting you decode the backwards satanic messages that are so common these days (yeah, right), the manual mentions using reverse to momentarily "bleep" obscenities.

 

Brake (third audio example) slows down the sound, as in "slamming on the brakes." The speed-down is variable from 0 to 10 seconds, and you can vary the mix of the dry sound as it goes on in the background, and the "braked" sound. In the audio example, the first brake is for the full 10 seconds, with no dry sound. The next brake is also 10 seconds, with some dry sound mixed in. Then there are some short brakes. I don't like the abrupt low-level "thunk" at the end, but I can live with it.

 

Repeat (fourth audio example) lets you repeat an interval from 2 bars all the way to 1/1024th of a beat (yes, that hits the audio range). As with Brake, there's a wet/dry control; the other control determines the interval, and you bring the effect in and out with one buttons, and initiate capture of the interval with the second button. Fun stuff!!

 

The Dual-Filter is very clever. One control is the wet/dry mix, while the other controls filter frequency. But the clever part is that the second button choose between a bandpass response, or a combination lowpass and highpass response. The way the latter works is that starting at the full counter-clockwise position, the low pass filter is all the way closed. As you turn the control clockwise, the filter opens up until halfway up, at which point the lowpass filter is all the way open. Then the highpass filter kicks in; at the halfway point, it passes everything then as you continue turning the control clockwise, more and more low frequencies are cut.

 

The fifth audio example starts off with no filtering, then goes into the bandpass mode. Then it goes back to no filtering; next, the lowpass filter closes down, then opens up and goes into the highpass mode. When it reaches the highest highpass setting, I switch back to bandpass, and then just before fading out, return to the unfiltered sound. In all these examples, the wet/dry control is on full wet so you hear the full effects of the filtering.

 

You all know what a Phaser sounds like, but here the twist is that the second control can either determine LFO speed, or sweep the phase manually, depending on the setting of the second button. The Flanger works similarly.

 

With Distortion, the second control determines the amount of nastiness, with its associated button choosing between an overdrive effect or a sample rate/decimation effect.

 

Delay is fairly standard; it's set up as a send effect, so the first knob controls send amount, and the second, the amount of feedback. The second button does tap tempo (I can't find any delay option for automatic tempo sync).

 

Reverb is reverb, with one control for send amount, and the other for reverb time. But what's cool here is that the second button has a freeze function, so you can freeze the reverb tail. A typical way to use this would be to set a long tail, freeze it, then go from wet to dry. Unfortunately with the current incarnation of BBS software I'm limited to five attachments per post, so we'll include an audio example of the reverb in the next post, along with some observations about the effects.

[Anderton]

All right, let's do that reverb audio example.

 

The clip starts off dry, then increase both the amount of wet signal at the reverb decay time. When it's at max decay, I hit the freeze button to capture this gloriously strange wash of sound , then back off into dry signal territory again. Then just before the end fade, I pulled the frozen section back up again for a little because...well, I just can't help myself.

 

So let's summarize the effects thing.

 

First of all, they're wonderful. The two knob/two button thing does the job, and limits you to intelligent choices rather than throwing a zillion parameters at you. As a result they're quick to use live, and responsive.

 

Not so good: This was the first time I felt a little cramped with the controls. I'm into fader-slamming type moves, and I don't have small hands. It's acceptable and useable the way it is, but I would have preferred slightly larger knobs, with more space between them.

 

One fine point is that when you change effects, the knob has to "grab" the current setting before it does anything. This makes sense; you wouldn't want to initiate, say, Delay and find the feedback was already up full. But the way Torq does this is pretty smart.

 

Let's say you call up a new effect. Referring to the attached image, the physical position of knob on the left (circled in yellow) is around 10 o'clock, while the existing parameter setting is 0. So, you need to move the knob's physical position to 0, at which point it "catches" the value and now the parameter value follows the knob.

 

You know if a knob has caught the setting, because a blue/purple skirt appears to show the knob position (see the knob circled in light blue).

 

There is one other fine point: I'm not totally sold on the taper of the wet.dry effect knob. It doesn't seem to use an equal power curve, because as it goes from dry to wet, the level appears to dip a little bit. This seemed to be the case with all the effects, so I'm not sure whether or not it was done on purpose. This is something that could easily be changed in a future rev if most users feel the same way. However, this does not get in the way of enjoying the effects, which really are quite cool - as you know if you listened to the audio examples!

[Anderton]

What’s a DJ setup without a mixer? Let’s take a look at what Torq has to offer.

 

Referring to the first attached image, the mixer section is highlighted. The main controls are arranged to the left and right of the meter, which instead of showing stereo, shows the left deck level in the left meter, and the right deck level in the right meter.

 

The top control sets incoming gain for purposes of level-matching (+/-12dB). The next three controls are for Highs, Mids, and Lows. The buttons next to each of these controls (including gain) are Kill buttons that, going from top to bottom, mute the channel, highs, mids, and lows. The knobs themselves have center detents – helpful when you’re trying to get back to the nominal setting. Note that everything described so far has a one-to-one correspondance on-screen.

 

For those not familiar with the way DJs work, the kill switches are important. Kill the bass, let the track ride for a few measures, and bring the bottom crashing back in.

 

Again referring to the screen shot, the next two buttons don’t seem to have direct physical counterparts (if they do, calling Chad – please point them out to me; they select line inputs (assigned under preferences) that cut off whatever is playing on Torq’s decks, and allow bringing in external signals – like maybe the output from a guitar rig of a crazed guitarist jamming along with you, a phrase sampler where you sampled audience members saying crazy things before the show, or whatever.

 

Next down are the PFL buttons (pre-fader levels). These have large, corresponding buttons toward the top of each deck so that they’re easy to hit, but difficult to hit accidentally. Or maybe they’re placed where they are because there was no room left in the mixer section itself. In any event, PFL is what allows you to cue up tunes and listen to what you’re doing without the audience hearing it, because the volume feeding your phones is independent of the output level. For traditional recording fans, this is like the pre/post switch on sends, where you can pick up the signal before or after the channel fader.

 

Next the channel signals go to the crossfader, so you can do crossfading and scratching. This crossfader has a very cool option: You can change the actual crossfader curve at the computer, and this isn’t a preference – you can do it any time, even in the middle of a performance. It's not switched; you can choose any curve between equal power (the same curve used for panning) and hard cut, which allows switching rapidly between cuts and ending up at full volume. This is almost like switching between channels instead of crossfading. Also note that below the PFL button, there’s an XFADE graphic. If you click on this, it swaps the crossfader’s channels – moving the crossfader to the left selects the right deck, and moving the crossfader to the right selects the left deck.

 

Finally, there are two very useful “transform” buttons to the left and right of the crossfader. They basically send the associated directly to the deck, regardless of the crossfader setting. For example, assume the crossfader is all the way to the right. Hitting the left transform button injects the left deck signal directly into the mix. I find this very cool for adding rhythmic accents from one deck to the other. There’s one anomaly: When you hit the physical buttons, the virtual buttons light. When you click on the virtual buttons, they don’t light. Not a big deal, but I just wanted to let you know I was paying attention.

 

Those are the mixer basics. Overall, it’s fluid and fast, I do wish the EQ knobs had a slightl larger diameter – I’m into real-time manipulation, and I have big fingers – but in practice, this doesn’t really make much different. On the plus side, the knobs have just enough resistance that if you brush up against a knob accidentally while moving another knob, the knob you brushed against almost certainly won’t move. The other ergonomic feature I really like is that the kill switches are inside the rows of knobs. This makes it really easy to hit kill switches for both channels simultaneously, which can produce very dramatic effects if done right.

 

Next, we’ll move on to the output stage and master controls.

[Anderton]

We've already skimmed this subject, but let's go deeper.

 

One of the things that appeals to me about digital DJing is not having to carry around a case of vinyl. Hey, that stuff is heavy and no, I don't care whether people think I'm macho or not. But another advantage of the digital approach is being able to database all your music - you don't have to flip through records until you find the one you want, but can search for it and even find out certain characteristics, like tempo in BPM, which you might not remember otherwise.

 

The Browser is very much like the Windows Explorer, which is very much like the tree structure that the Mac introduced in System 7...so if you've used a computer, you'll understand how to browse. You can browse what's in your computer, as well as external devices like external hard drives, or MP3 players that can be recognized by your computer as an external storage device. I feel the best way to deal with the browser is to buy yourself a big honkin' USB 2.0 or FireWire hard drive (internal or external), and dedicate your music collection to that drive. By centralizing everything to one drive, you can back it up easily, and go through minimal mouse clicks while browsing.

 

However, the Browser is about a lot more than just looking through your computer for files, as it has several dedicated elements (see the attached image).

 

Database: You can add folders of music to the database, which includes search functionality. It seems this doesn't add the files contained in the folder, but rather, points to the folder (wherever it is - computer, external drive, etc.) and extracts relevant information from any ID3 tags embedded in the file. Note, however, that you can enter information here as well; for example, ID3 tags seldom include the key, but you can enter that yourself. All this data gets stored in the associated .TQD file mentioned earlier.

 

I'm not sure where the database file is stored, so I'm not sure how you'd back it up...Chad, can you enlighten me? However, note that the Database isn't just a static, read-only option; you can drag file names into the decks just as you would from the desktop, or when exploring your computer. (Technically speaking, you can think of the database as similar to "indexing" on Windows and Mac, where the computer learns where material is to speed up searches. In fact, when you add a folder to the database, there's a delay while ).

 

My Music (or Music on the Mac): This is one click away from accessing the default music folder for Mac or Windows.

 

Playlists: These are collections of songs (in whatever order you specify) that you can pop into a set as needed, or prepare in advance for complex sets. Another type of playlist, the Session Playlist, keeps track of what you've done since launching Torq. This is pretty cool, because if you do something really inspired, you'll be able to analyze exactly what you did.

 

The Browser can also access iTunes if you have it installed on your computer (and specify under preferences that you want to make it accessible to the browser), as well as access music stored on a connected iPod (but not the iPod Shuffle, or music stored on an iPhone/iTouch).

 

By the way, note the headphone button in the lower left: This lets you audition whateveryou're browsing.