The Channel Strip looks rather familiar, and is based on the EQ and Dynamics section of the C200 digital console, which was itself modelled on analogue SSL desks. As with other wrapped/powered plugins, these still seem to use some of the host computer’s horsepower, although Duende is slightly less taxing than the UAD-1 PCI card, for example. Numbers are halved for 88.2/96kHz operation. One Duende allows 32 mono or 16 stereo plugins at up to 48kHz - the four different plugins each use one of the 32 memory slots available. There is nothing to control here, but the page that appears displays DSP slot usage (there are eight slots across four chips), along with driver and firmware versions, and serial number. On a Mac the control panel is installed to the Other section of System Preferences. There was little indication in the manual that Duende needed to be first or have its own dedicated Firewire buss, but perhaps this should have been obvious. But when the problem returned, two reinstallations failed to cure it, and it turned out that chaining the box after a DVD writer on the Firewire buss was causing bandwidth choking.

I suffered stuttering audio problems that SSL initially ascribed to buffer problems, and a reinstallation seemed to cure it. Installation is straightforward and quick. Included with the unit are Channel Strip and Bus Compressor plugins, optional add-ons currently comprise Drumstrip and X-EQ which demo for a short time unless purchased. These are Audio Unit and VST as standard, the latter wrapped into RTAS versions using a second installer. Accompanying the unit in the elegantly packaged box is software which installs the accompanying plugins onto your computer. The box is very light, and apart from the DC connector, the rear simply provides a pair of Firewire 400 connectors (which normally makes the PSU redundant). Despite the manual talking of squeezing the processing into a 1U rack, there is mostly air inside: this could easily have fitted into a rather smaller package, but the smart 19” format means that most studios can screw it into the bottom of a rack and impress clients. Duende is a Spanish word – “A mysterious power that all may feel and no philosophy can explain.” But I’m going to try anyway… Duende comes as a 1U rackmount box which houses a board with 40-bit floating point DSP processing engine chips.

Ssl duende compressor