In 2001, Metric Halo blazed a trail for the industry by introducing the first interface with support for instantiable DSP.

17 years later we took +DSP to the next level. 3d core technology is based upon a fused FPGA/multi-processor design. To take advantage of this we offloaded as much of the core audio processing functions from the DSPs to the FPGA as we could.

And the results are stunning.

Within the FPGA we implemented a complementary set of custom designed audio-optimized processors that all interface to each other with virtually no latency. The Metric Halo custom designed processors in each 3d Card include:

• A fully interpolated, high-precision 128 input by 64 output matrix mixer
• A 1024x1024 channel audio signal crosspoint router
• A 1024 channel VU, PPM and Peak Hold metering engine
• MH Link packet formatter and processor
• Custom USB audio packet formatter and processor
• A variety of audio data processors
• Custom DMA processor with fixed/float conversion support

The processing power of the FPGA-based custom processors in 3d amount to roughly 30x the processing power of the DSP on the 2d Card. All the processors in the FPGA run with 1 sample of latency. All processors in the FPGA support their full capability at 192kHz. All of the audio transport in the system (with the exception of DSP processing) is managed completely in hardware.

The 3d Core DMA engine connects to the fully programmable floating point DSP cores, which continue to support instantiable plug-in processing, with the added benefit of massively increasing the amount of low-latency memory available to the plug-ins. Each 3d Card has 1 GB of memory available for DSP processing - more than 2500x the memory that was available on 2d. This means that running out of memory for delays or reverbs is a thing of the past.

We have included the full +DSP suite with the purchase of 3d. You can now access all the +DSP plug-ins as well as the +DSP graph on all units without an additional license.

3d is just the start of the next chapter in MH’s audio technologies. We have built future-proof extensibility into the hardware at its base level.

Buy 3d for the problems it solves for you today. With Metric Halo’s 17 year proven commitment to future proof hardware, you can be confident that it will continue to help you solve new problems tomorrow.

Visit the 3d Card Early Access | Overview & Tech Specs to learn more, and sign-up via the 3d Public Beta page and receive updates to the beta software or documentation as changes are made.