I’ve made myself a Christmas present and bought the Dwarf. I’m primarily a guitar player, but the idea of a box that could serve all my sound design needs in the studio, but then could also be unplugged and taken to a gig, was appealing to me since the very first time I’ve heard about the Mod Duo a few years back.
Anyway, my first impressions are positive. I haven’t experienced any noise issues at all, which I feared due to user reports and my experience with some other multi-FX units in the past (I’m using balanced cables for the output but that’s the only precaution I’ve made). I had some trouble accessing the web GUI but a quick chat with support solved that, which was great.
I’ve only scratched the surface of the device, but there are two things that are immediately apparent to someone who’s primarily a guitar player:
-
Latency. It’s not bad but it is behind the competition (most guitar-centric FX processors have a latency of 1-4ms). I’m sure if I plugged in directly into PA 8ms wouldn’t bother me almost at all (which ‘direct monitoring’ switch on my interface seems to confirm), but 8ms stacked on top of a few ms from a DAW adds up and it can be noticeable even to someone who’s not an especially talented musician (not saying this to be modest, but rather suggesting there may be a lot of musicians out there with higher expectations). Not every interface supports direct monitoring (mine does but the implementation is fairly rudimentary). So my question is: would it be possible to implement a 64 buffer size on the device for the less demanding patches in which low latency is important (drive pedal + amp + reverb probably wouldn’t overload the CPU with a smaller buffer but I’m just guessing).
-
IR’s. Do they still only support the length of 2.6ms? I’m assuming that’s the case because some of my favorite IR’s wouldn’t work at all with your loader. Surprisingly one of my favorite IR’s with a very close-miked speaker, and some of my acoustic IR’s seem to be working decently well, but I feel like this 2.6ms limit is the main reason many musicians that are primarily guitar-players, would disregard Dwarf as a viable option for their setup. I don’t think Dwarf can ever directly compete with Helix/Fractal/Quad Cortex, etc. because it’s not the same type of product (and I feel it’s much better for it when it comes to my use-case) but extending the IR support, and adding a few more amps with the quality (look and feel) of the Onyx among the free options would allow Dwarf to catch up a fair bit to what the guitar-centric competition offers.
Dwarf was not an impulse buy, I already knew it was special and would fit my workflow well, before I got it, which the first few hours with the device confirmed. I’d like to congratulate the MOD team for what you’ve managed to build, and I understand that building upon it takes time, especially with a small team. However, I also feel that both of the features/improvements mentioned above are fairly important to many current and potential users. I assume they might have been already requested, but I believe it’s important to emphasize their high priority.
Oh, and happy holidays!
